After some Thursday evening dance outs at various local hostelries in July, including a particularly successful evening at the Beehive at White Waltham, and a visit to Mortimer to dance at the Turner’s Arms before visiting Lee’s fabulous new house nearby, it was August! And that meant of course Sidmouth, where there were (just) enough BB dancers to appear once more on the prom on the Sunday morning of Sidmouth Folk Week. Back home, we had an interesting evening dance out the folloiwng week in Reading with a visiting team from Australia, Adelaide Morris, plus our good friends Windsor Morris. The evening finished in pedestrianised Broad Street with one of our more bizarre Magic Arches, with the last entry through the ‘arch’ being a large cherry picker which had been waiting to pass through the morris dancers to do some maintenance work further up the road. The driver looked first bemused and then rather pleased as he was applauded through the arch though the dancers had to stand a long way back to let him through.
Then just a few days later we attended the Baldon Feast at Marsh Baldon, a very pleasant country fair type event in a quiet but pretty village just south of Oxford. Despite a small team and a few injuries, we were very well received. However the mc for the day, when introducing us, was very surprised to find out that there were morris dancers outside Oxfordshire, where he had assumed they all came from. We reassured him they could also be found in other parts of the UK, but refrained from blowing his mind by telling him they could be found worldwide…
