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ventaHurrah, we have the internet back! Someone had sliced through a critical cable, and Virgin Media Man has now, I dunno, knotted it back together or something. Expect a volley of blog posts, as various rough drafts from the last fortnight come out...
At the beginning of September, I went away for the weekend with my occasional dance team, Boojum.
Note for new(ish) readers: I do a form of traditional English folk-dancing called rapper. It looks a bit like this. It's from the north-east, and no one has ever heard of it. It involves short, bendy strips of metal which we (inaccurately) call swords, and usually happens in pubs. I belong to a team called Mabel Gubbins, based in Oxfordshire. Since Boojum formed in 2001 - of people scatted from Newcastle to Canterbury - I've also danced with them.
Boojum have always gone in for meeting up at odd times, in odd places, dancing wherever anyone would have us. We've had a lot of fun. But... we've decided to call it quits.
When we formed, the team was five dancers, the musician and a Tommy (whose job it is to announce us, and generally keep order). Just seven people, we could squash onto floors in others' houses. A sixth dancer swiftly joined (learning the dance from watching a video, and dancing in my place at a booking I couldn't make), and then a seventh. We carried on racketing about all over the country, turning up in far-flung locations late on Friday nights and drinking too much red wine before getting up to dance all day on Saturday. We went as invited guests to festivals in Europe and America - some people did the New York trip as a weekend, flying in on Friday and out on Saturday - and had some wonderful times.
I'm the youngest Boojum by more than a decade - and the oldest, Jenny, is over 70. Rhiannon has been too ill to dance with us for a year or more. We took the somersault figure out of our dance after Sue's second bout of shoulder surgery made her concede her somersaulting days were over. Jean's knee's never recovered properly from that skiing accident, and... you get the idea. We're aging, and slowing up. Hurtling up the motorway for hours on a Friday night is no longer everyone's idea of a good time.
Several people who were single when we started have collected new partners. Instead of the original compact seven, we became a group of fifteen or more as Husbands-And-Boyfriends came along. Finding enough space for us all to stay became an ongoing problem.
And, in short, although we still loved dancing together, the organisation was becoming a chore. So we've decided to call it a day while we're all still friends. We met in September in Bacup - a convenient almost-middle point for the most distant members, and somewhere we've ended up a lot in the past few years thanks to some incredibly cheap holiday cottages. In now-typical fashion we were down to six dancers - and then Mel broke her wrist. Five is the absolute minimum for rapper. We practised, and cobbled two of our dances into decent shape, with me filling in (rather approximately) for Mel. We danced in the lovely micro-brewery Bare Arts, and we danced at the Whitworth Rushcart. And we had a jolly splendid three course meal that one of the HABs cooked while we were practising. And, just for old time's sake, we drank a lot of wine. We reminisced a bit, and agreed that we wouldn't have missed it for the world.
And that was supposed to be it. However... Mel is getting married in March, and please would we dance at her wedding? Oh, go on then :)
At the beginning of September, I went away for the weekend with my occasional dance team, Boojum.
Note for new(ish) readers: I do a form of traditional English folk-dancing called rapper. It looks a bit like this. It's from the north-east, and no one has ever heard of it. It involves short, bendy strips of metal which we (inaccurately) call swords, and usually happens in pubs. I belong to a team called Mabel Gubbins, based in Oxfordshire. Since Boojum formed in 2001 - of people scatted from Newcastle to Canterbury - I've also danced with them.
Boojum have always gone in for meeting up at odd times, in odd places, dancing wherever anyone would have us. We've had a lot of fun. But... we've decided to call it quits.
When we formed, the team was five dancers, the musician and a Tommy (whose job it is to announce us, and generally keep order). Just seven people, we could squash onto floors in others' houses. A sixth dancer swiftly joined (learning the dance from watching a video, and dancing in my place at a booking I couldn't make), and then a seventh. We carried on racketing about all over the country, turning up in far-flung locations late on Friday nights and drinking too much red wine before getting up to dance all day on Saturday. We went as invited guests to festivals in Europe and America - some people did the New York trip as a weekend, flying in on Friday and out on Saturday - and had some wonderful times.
I'm the youngest Boojum by more than a decade - and the oldest, Jenny, is over 70. Rhiannon has been too ill to dance with us for a year or more. We took the somersault figure out of our dance after Sue's second bout of shoulder surgery made her concede her somersaulting days were over. Jean's knee's never recovered properly from that skiing accident, and... you get the idea. We're aging, and slowing up. Hurtling up the motorway for hours on a Friday night is no longer everyone's idea of a good time.
Several people who were single when we started have collected new partners. Instead of the original compact seven, we became a group of fifteen or more as Husbands-And-Boyfriends came along. Finding enough space for us all to stay became an ongoing problem.
And, in short, although we still loved dancing together, the organisation was becoming a chore. So we've decided to call it a day while we're all still friends. We met in September in Bacup - a convenient almost-middle point for the most distant members, and somewhere we've ended up a lot in the past few years thanks to some incredibly cheap holiday cottages. In now-typical fashion we were down to six dancers - and then Mel broke her wrist. Five is the absolute minimum for rapper. We practised, and cobbled two of our dances into decent shape, with me filling in (rather approximately) for Mel. We danced in the lovely micro-brewery Bare Arts, and we danced at the Whitworth Rushcart. And we had a jolly splendid three course meal that one of the HABs cooked while we were practising. And, just for old time's sake, we drank a lot of wine. We reminisced a bit, and agreed that we wouldn't have missed it for the world.
And that was supposed to be it. However... Mel is getting married in March, and please would we dance at her wedding? Oh, go on then :)
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no subject
Date: 2014-09-27 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-27 06:17 pm (UTC)Teams form and furl all the time (if they don't schism!) It's sad - we were all a bit teary as we headed home - but it's clearly the right decision.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-27 08:04 pm (UTC)Hope you find some other outlets for your dancing!
no subject
Date: 2014-09-27 10:47 pm (UTC)One kudo to you. And yes, Mabel Gubbins provides me with plenty of dancing opportunity :)
no subject
Date: 2014-09-27 10:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-29 12:50 pm (UTC)