Today we went to a May Day fair down in the place where we had our Christmas and Chinese party. Here we learnt about Morris Dancers and watched some, who were very, very good at it. They had hankerchieves and large, wooden sticks to bang together. The first dance they showed us was the best in my opinion, where they banged sticks and ran around in lines, their leather straps tied around their legs with the bells on them jingling, their tight waistcoats almost coming towards to their thighs. Even then they other red jumpers and baggy, black trousers, let alone the clonky brown trainers. Their faces looked happy too.
Did I mention the yellow and green hankerchieves that ran down from their red breeches piling onto their knees? Well, on the second dance, they released them from their breeches and instead clutched them in their hands, and waved them at each other like some sort of sport that somebody had won and had felt very pleased with themselves and were showing off to the losers (who were, at the time, pretending to be winners). It was weird, but quite funny too, and it made you really want to grin.
The third dance was back with the sticks, but it was a different kind of dance all along. It was a kind of mix with the two others, but without the hankerchief being held. Then they all gathered us up to make our very own Morris Dance. They gave us some white tissues (they didn’t have enough hankicheives) to flap around, and we did. The dance that we had to copy was actually really hard, but we tried to do it anyway, and waved the hankichieves behind our backs and under our ankles at the exact second of time. Then they gave us some heavy sticks (while telling us to be extremely cautious and not banging each other’s heads in) and told us to do the other dances with the sticks. I teamed up randoming with an around-fourteen-years-of-age girl called Charlotte, who was nice, but just slightly too old for me to properly play with as a friend. Then Mummy took a photo of me nearly bashing Katie’s head in.
Then we had a huge spread for lunch which was really nice. We had red velvet cake and sandwiches and sushi and chocolate cake and loads of other tasty things. Then we filled up our stomachs with cake and biscuits and more tasty stuff. There was pain au chocolat and other tasty things, but my tummy said, “No, you’re going to make me burst! Don’t you dare eat another thing!” So I calmed it down by jumping around a lot and sat down.
But no! There was the May Pole, grinning its pride out at the visitors of the place that I don’t know where it is…. Anyway, there were blue and yellow ribbons pouring out of the top of the towering pole. Me and Katie grabbed a blue, but Matilda took the odd-one-out yellow ribbon. She and her followers took two steps inwards, and then danced around the white pole a few paces away from them. Then they crouched down in the middle while us blues danced round too, our ribbons wrapping up the May Pole like stars around the Moon. Then we unravelled our blue ribbons. “Yellows, step up!” The leader of the Morris Dancers called. The Yellows then unravelled their ribbons. We got two turns.
We were then alerted about the Bouncy Castle outside the door. It was full of toddlers, but Katie just bounced and huddled in the corner sometimes, waiting for the toddlers to go past and not say, “Pway wiv me!”, while me and Matilda bounced around, and sometimes pursuaded Katie to forget about the toddlers. But anyway, it was fun, and it had inflatable snakes and toys inside it. It was cool. Unfortunately, we then had to go home 🙁
