Welcome Home

Having returned from our stay in Edinburgh, I immediately began experiencing holiday flashbacks.

Upon arrival in Horsham the first thing I did was leave on a business trip to Birmingham. As I checked into the Travel Inn I found the room startlingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, identical to the Travel Inn I had just left in Edinburgh. I realize these are cookie-cutter motels but the exacting detail gave me a strange feeling of déjà vu.

No sooner did I return home when—while walking through the market square on Saturday morning—we were greeted by the sound of bagpipes. Turns out I hadn't slipped thorough a time/space fissure but had merely stumbled upon our town's Annual Day Of Dance.
  

Yeee Haaaw

 
The Day Of Dance, despite being a yearly occurrence, never fails to take us by surprise and it's always an unexpected pleasure to find the town center turned into a colorful jumble of Morris Men, Magogs, cloggers and various folk dancers all banging sticks, clacking heels and waving scarves to a cacophony of folksy instruments (as well as the occasional bagpipe).

On this day, you can't swing a faggot (and before you start scrambling for the Civil Liberties Union's phone number, that means a bundle of sticks, or a tasty meat ball traditionally made from pig heart, liver and fatty bacon minced together with herbs and breadcrumbs) without hitting someone dressed in rags, jingle-bells and a funny hat. I don't know if these festivals take place in any of the surrounding towns, but I know they didn't happen in Clifton Park, so it's always a treat to discover that the dancers have arrived.
  

Really, how deeply do you have to look into this before you begin to suspect that, in the past, it ended in human sacrifice? (NOTE: Currently, human sacrifice is discouraged outside of Wales.)

  
If you've never seen a Morris Dance, it's impossible to describe. It's also impossible not to watch them for any length of time and not come to realize that, while the fanciful Irish and Scottish folk dances have their roots in more recent times, the Morris Dances—though admittedly sillier—seem authentically rooted in the pagan past. How or why they were handed down to the present generation I'll never know, but that's only because I'm too lazy to bother looking it up; I expect there is a plethora of information out there just waiting to be mined.
  

The best thing about Morris dancers is they are easy to pick out of a crowd

  
But whatever the reason, I'm just grateful they migrate to Horsham once a year, and that I am here to enjoy them, and, most of all, that our local butcher sells faggots.