venta

This weekend my occasional rapper team, Boojum trotted off to a music festival in the tiny Yorkshire town of Masham.

What's in Masham ? Well, some very pretty buildings, a nice river, more ice cream shops than you might expect... and two breweries. Theakston's, and the Black Sheep Brewery. And, this weekend, an awful lot of music.

Actually, Masham (it's pronounced Mass'em, by the way) is also home to one of the best butchers in the world, and to a chapel which has been converted into a lovely holiday cottage. We rented one, which was next to the other, resulting in a rather luxurious weekend with cracking fry-ups each morning. (The breakfasts were mostly noteworthy for two things: rectangular black pudding, and yellow eggs. Even when scrambled, the eggs were a vivid gold - brought by our Tommy from his own hens. But I digress.)

Post breakfast on Saturday, we duly presented ourselves at the town hall. The team was just booked as generic "street entertainment" along with four other sides. Now, lets see who's been paying attention to my LJ recently:

Where do morris teams like dancing ?
(a) pubs
(b) carparks

Where do rapper teams like dancing ?
(a)pubs
(b) carparks

If you answered (b) and (a) respectively, well done. However, the festival was organised by morris people, and they wanted the general public entertained as it walked about Masham, so car parks (or at least, a slightly mysterious area outside the town hall, which seems to be neither road nor carpark) it was. Nasty, nasty gravel.

Flash Company, a Border team kicked off.
	They have a very impressive band, ranging up to about 8 or 9 people at some points in the weekend, and I was initially quite surprised to identify the first tune they danced to as Tide Is High. Sadly, since the band is so impressive they tend to draw all the attention, while the four dancers are very much secondary.
The Flag Crackers of Craven also dance border, but there are rather more of them. And they are just generally bigger, showier and more impressive.
	They also do a mean line in hats. Border teams, you see, often only have a vague theme of costume - so long as you wear team colours, then if you can sew it to your shirt, hang it round your neck or fasten it to your hat, it's fair game. My uncle has a sheep's skull and two full feathered duck wings attached to his Border hat (no, I'm not 100% sure why, either).
Diversity[*] are a team I've not encountered before, and dance all kinds of different traditions and styles. They're (mostly) good at what they do, but somehow lack a bit of showmanship and the performances come out a bit flat.
	Persephone are a ladies' North West morris team (and bother Wikipedia for not having a proper North West page) - they dance morris, but they do it in clogs and don't wave hankies about. They're the sort of team who'll always put on a fine show, even when it's bloody hot, as it was all this weekend.

Yes, hot. Really, really bloody hot, humid, muggy and horrible. And sometimes sunny.

Now, where do rapper teams like to dance ? That's right, in pubs. In the evenings. We do not like dancing in blazing sunshine in the middle of the day. And frankly, if we'd been expecting to dance in blazing sunshine, we might not have decided that our team kit would be entirely made of black lycra.

This weekend ? Too bloody hot.

When we'd finished our morning's scuffing by the town hall, we headed over to The White Bear, which is a Theakston's pub. Now, Pintwatch has a confession to make. In a pub with 4+ hand pumps of beer brewed barely down the road, Pintwatch was drinking Kronenbourg. In its defence, Pintwatch would like to point out that it was drinking Kronenbourg Blanc, which is (surprise!) a white beer. It tastes like it might be a wheat beer, but Pintwatch isn't sure - Pintwatch has only tried Hoegaarden, which it despises. Pintwatch approves Blanc as a nice summer beer, but warns that it's on the pricey side (£1.90 a half!)

In the afternoon buses took two teams out to a village called Fearby, and took us and Persephone out to a nearby - very pretty - village called Scared Witless.

Pintwatch drank Crouch Vale beer there (slightly guility, really, but it already knows what Black Sheep tastes like), and read the slightly bizarre cricket rules. You see, Scared Witless' village green is the cricket ground. Perfectly ordinary cricket ground - if you ignore the road running through it, the fact that the outfield is partly carpark, the four trees, the road signs and, er, the pub. If you hit the pub wall (which puts its window guards up on cricket Saturdays) it's a four, if you clear the pub roof it's a six. Sadly, the Scared Witless cricket team was away (playing Masham, as it happened, and apparently winning), so we had the green to ourselves. Apart from some people who came out to watch us, which was very nice of them since it was so bloody hot. The Buck Inn retains the medal as the only pub which let us dance inside all bloody weekend.

Masham has four pubs. Two have wooden floors. Both wouldn't let us dance. Boo! But on the plus side, both had the requisiste ingredients and weren't surprised when I asked for ginger beer shandy (that's ginger beer and bitter). Hurray! My mother always calls this drink "shandy gaff", but no one else seems to use that name. Googling for this shandy gaff produces a lot of recipes which mix bitter and ginger ale (eww!? should I try that ?). Delightfully, the list of the top ten hits includes the newsletter of the Ljubljana Cricket Club.

I actually saw remarkably little of the festival - by the time we were let off dancing, we paused only to buy ice cream, then ran screaming home for showers. Did I mention it was hot ? Eventually, a small pack of us made it out for an evening stroll, but Melanie and I lost the others immediately as we ran off to play on the swings. The park had a good see-saw too, and I must say roundabout technology has come on a bit.

Sunday was also bloody hot, and featured more dancing in carparks. Pausing on the way into the ice cream shop, I read the list of sweets they sold. It's a real, old-fashioned sweet shop and prides itself on selling 'old' sweets. "Sweet tobacco?" I read off the board, somewhat confused, and then heard several of my team yelling in glee - they rememebered it. It turns out to be strands of coconut covered in sugar and cocoa powder, and it's really rather nice. Apparently it used to be sold under the name "Spanish Gold", and came in little mock tobacco packets, made of waxed paper. Mine is disappointingly in a cellophane bag, but I have to say I'm a convert.

The journey home was considerably enlivened by a scary flash hailstorm a little way south on the A1. Hailstones the size of marbles, hitting the car with such force that we couldn't hear each other talk for the drumming on the roof, and causing serious worry about the continued integrity of the windscreen. It probably only lasted for five to ten minutes, but during that time traffic slowed to a complete crawl - I don't think I've ever seen hail and rain quite like that. I'm not sure hailstorms on blazing hot days really fit in with my worldview, but I definitely experienced one.

[*] Note for my parents: Diversity is apparently grown-up NYFTE. Their Dorset Four-hand with water pistols is slightly less exciting than you might think.