At risk of sounding like I’ve either got a vendetta against morris dancers, or am a big fan of them, due to how frequently I seem to write about them, I saw some more Morris Dancing today.
My friend Eve and I were passing through Trafalgar Square today when we stumbled upon literally hundreds of Morris Dancers – it was all because of this. We hung around for a few minutes to take in what can loosely be described as “culture” (ie: old men prancing around), and to enjoy the amusing juxtaposition with some Falun Gong dancers who were also on the square waving their traditional hankies around too (theirs were red) – it was almost like a dance battle were taking place.
One thing that stunned us though were that one troop of Morris Dancers had blacked up. It’s just not something you’d expect to see in this century, let alone in a city as diverse and cosmopolitan as London. Clearly these country bumpkins who’d been bussed in for the day were as familiar with social progress as I imagine they are with modern technological wonders like the wheelbarrow or not marrying their cousins.
As we moved closer, to try to verify that yes, there really were blacked up men dancing on Trafalgar Square, a couple heard Eve saying “Well this isn’t very politically correct, is it?”
“Ah, but how do you know they’ve ‘blacked up’? They could have blackened their faces to be like miners, as they’re from rural England, and Morris Dancing was around before they knew about black people”, they said quite smugly, having shown us young people who’s boss.
It was at this point that we had to make a decision: how to respond? Obviously, the route I’d usually take in such a situation would be to troll them, and try and wind them up – but unlike most people who I’ll try to wind up, they were on the older side of middle-aged, so my genetic programming to be polite to old strangers kicked in and prevented me from jumping on my high-horse.
In the end, I responded with a rather tepid “Well, it doesn’t reflect terribly well on them, does it?” followed by explaining that Eve and I were members of the “PC Brigade”.
Seizing the moment, the wife of this couple delivered a knock-out blow in the tête-à-tête, by wryly wondering aloud if that by presuming that it was racist, when it might not be, that makes Eve and I the racists? The logic was pretty sound – after all, if I were to speculate that Robert Mugabe were a nasty, totalitarian bastard, when it turns out that he’s actually a lovely old man, that makes me the nasty, totalitarian bastard. The couple walked off, smugly, with their metaphorical copies of the Daily Express under their arms.
However, what makes this interesting that having since done some research – it turns out that the blacked-up Morris dancers was almost certainly playing on racial stereotypes. Here and here explain that blacking-up is something to do with North African origins of the practice. And as if this isn’t explicit enough, one Morris Dancing group based in the North West are called the ‘Britannia Coco-nut Dancers’ and you can see from their photos that they look like they enjoy blacking up.
So in a way, we were sort of right – they were blacking-up, and I guess the ethical question of “blacking up isn’t really on, is it?” remains for you to decide.
But take THAT old couple who I’ll never speak to ever again. I win at Morris Dancing factual accuracy.
Even though I’m 20 and a militant atheist, my parents have continued to do the honourable thing and buy their son a couple of Easter eggs. After all, how else am I supposed to celebrate Jesus’s death? The egg presumably representing his chocolatey exterior, and Toy Story 2 on the TV representing his love of Tom Hanks.
I had a bit of a crisis this morning though – one of my eggs was a Mars Celebrations egg. As you might expect, it looked horrendously nice – I think the curvature of Easter eggs must make the chocolate extra decent, or maybe the neurones in my brain were firing extra hard upon seeing a familiar brand, kicking a psychological process into action – the trouble was though there was a looming question: is it suitable for vegetarians?
You might remember that there was a load of hassle last year when Masterfoods, the company that make Mars, Malteasers, Celebrations and so on, switched to using murdered animals in their products, and I ended up writing perhaps the most passionate and emotional blog entry I’ve ever written (my blog entry on the Janjaweed Militia was more tempered). Eventually, they did a massive U-turn on their decision when they realised that it might create some bad PR for them.
This is all well and good, but if you read the small print, it turns out that Twix, Bounty and most importantly, Celebrations are still tainted with the foul stench of death. The question is… what about the actual physical egg? There doesn’t seem to be any documentation one way or the other on that. I couldn’t care less about the individual chocolates, as they’re not special – I need to know whether the egg contains any animals. I almost literally need to find out the answer to what came first… the chicken or the egg?
I’m tempted to risk it… as it does look really nice. Hopefully Masterfoods have an irony department, and have picked up on the fact that it would be hideously ironic if the symbol of new life was manufactured using the murdered corpses of several old lives.
What should I do, readers?
Update: The egg has been consumed. I hope nothing died for my enjoyment of it.
I know what you’re thinking: “how did James spend New Years Eve?”. Perhaps somewhat predictably, I went down to London to watch the fireworks and all that. It was certainly a once-in-a-lifetime event. I mean, sure, you could do it again, but whether you’d want to is another question all together.
We drove down to London, parking at Finchley Central tube station on the outskirts, and caught the tube in. We made our way to Westminster, and more specifically, the excellent pub at the Namco Station on the South Bank. Unlike normal pubs, this pub is built into an arcade, so has a bowling alley, arcade games and dodgems. Its literally the best pub ever. So we spent the last few hours of 2007 behaving like teenagers.
Unfortunately though, at about ten o’clock, they closed off the whole South Bank, because that was where all the fireworks were going to be – so we were kicked out on to Westminster Bridge with two hours to spare. There were no drinks for sale on the bridge, and we didn’t have the foresight to bring any, which meant the two hours passed exceedingly slowly.
I tried to pass the time by doing some Peter-Kay-esque observational comedy. “Remember stuff from years ago? Eh? Eh? Remember when we had to manually type custom ringtones into black and white mobile phones? What’s with that? And when you go in a lift, right, you press the number of the floor you want to go to… but why is there a doors close button? The doors are going to close anyway! What’s with that?”
Eventually, midnight arrived, and some fireworks exploded, that sort of thing. Unlike poor Diamond Geezer, we had the best place in London. Being on Westminster Bridge, we had a full view of both Big Ben striking midnight, and the fireworks display on the London Eye. The fireworks were pretty spectacular, as you’ll see in the video:
After the fireworks display, the organisation of the event sort of fell apart, as nearly all 700,000 revellers descended on Waterloo tube station to get home (Westminster and Embankment were closed). And it turned out that the pub wasn’t reopening after midnight, so we had to join them. After faffing about for about an hour I cleverly hatched a plan to head to Southwark station which was just a bit further a long – which turned out to be a good idea, as there were only around 100,000 people who had that same idea.
But we eventually got back and it all worked out alright. I think being in London was a good idea. Really.
My family seem to have reacted moderately positively towards their gifts. My sister enjoyed looking at her Top Shop voucher, my dad seemed pleased with the book he told me to buy him, and my mum better enjoy her kettle-with-built-in-water-filter, given the price.
I got another excellent present too: my sister got me a tiny remote controlled helicopter (made of polystyrene or something) – so expect the inevitable video of it landing on my dad’s bald head to follow shortly.
Christmas is excellent. Merry Christmas everyone, again.
People came almost literally from all over the country – we had people who’d come from Scotland, Wales, East Anglia, Kent, the south coast – almost everywhere really. My friend Jeroen, who’s from the Netherlands, had even given up a day of his holiday in London to meet us all.
Nearly everyone who was there.
Being the webmaster and technically the owner of a major website has its perks. In the afternoon, when we were all in Hyde Park, my fellow administrators and I managed to persuade a couple of the lesser proletariat to go and buy us drinks. The other interesting thing was that because I’m the webmaster, the bloke at the top, I sort of assumed the leadership position. I was making executive decisions about where we should go and where we should go and so on.
Jeroen, Mike, Me, Steffan and Terry – the PKMN.NET Administration team.
It was when I was speaking to the group as a whole and leading people to a spot in the park that I realised that I had created an army. I’d re-iterate that it was amazing, but I fear that it could be (correctly) interpreted that I was enjoying the power trip and megalomania more than I was the meeting people.
Most of the gang lasted until Leicester Square.
After the “official” meet in Hyde Park, about fourteen of us took a trip to Leicester Square to acquisition some food, before (at my command) heading to Westminster via Trafalgar Square. It’s not a trip to London if you don’t see Big Ben. It wasn’t until we were sitting in an underground bar in the former Greater London Council meeting (just across the Thames from Parliament) that we realised we were missing someone. Whoops.
We found him eventually though. As the evening went on it ended up with seven of us, the most hardcore of the gang going to another pub near Euston station – which coincidentally, was a Scream pub. In other words, the same brand of pubs I go to all of the time – and it was just like the ones in Leicester, with its stacker, video jukebox and pool table. The only difference was that it was charging London Prices.
I went for a walk with Bouff around town to see where was cordoned off. Here a couple of thrilling photos of some Police cars and so on. This practically makes me a journalist. Maybe.
Update (15/07, 01:37): Apparently these photos have been shown on BBC News 24. Luckily I pre-empted this and despite being out, were Sky plussing it all evening. Fingers crossed they’ll be some bad quality video of News 24 on here tomorrow!
Birmingham is an awful city, and is full of awful people, yet for some unfathomable reason, decent bands still insist on playing there.
I went to see Me First and the Gimme Gimmes at Carling Academy, with Bouff. They do out-of-genre covers of famous songs in a punky sort of style. It’s basically a combination of the two greatest things in music: out of genre covers and punk. It’s basically the only time you’re going to see a circle pit to Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
Getting into Birmingham was a veritable nightmare – every road seems to simply splinter off of every other road, which confused the satnav, and the people of Birmingham don’t seem to understand basic traffic signals. As I drove through the centre, they’d just haphazardly wander into the road without a care in the world. At one point, approaching a pedestrian crossing with the lights on green, two women with pushchairs simply walked out into the road. I’d have had a billion points on my license if I wasn’t such a careful motorist.
After eventually getting parked, in a multi-storey car park on which most of the lights were not working (resulting in near darkness), we had a look around the city centre. It was full of hundreds of thousands of awful people – aside from the pedestrians who are no more coordinated in a pedestrianised area than in the middle of a public highway, we were approached by two nutters on two separate occasions.
The first woman was after a light for a cigarette, who could simply be ignored. A few minutes later a shifty looking man said “excuse me guys”, whilst I had my mobile phone out. Now, if you’re the critical type, you’re probably thinking “he didn’t look shifty, James is just paranoid and using loaded vernacular language”, but he really did look shifty. He had the sort of stereotypical murderer face – covered in unusual bumps and battered through years of socio-economic hardship, with an expression set to a permanent grimace. Like Cherie Blair.
I said “Sorry!”, and continued walking, as I thought he was going to grab my phone, “you haven’t even listened to what I was going to say yet!”, he cried back at us. I don’t think I missed much – I doubt his pearl of wisdom would have been that earth-shattering. Phone snatchering, maybe.
The gig was good though. It was a little disappointing that bassist Fat Mike (of NOFX fame) had pulled out, but he was replaced by Eric Melvin, also of NOFX. I’m not terribly familiar with the Gimmies discography, so didn’t really identify most of the songs – although they were all covers. They did the famous song from the musical Annie, Somewhere over the Rainbow, Ghost Riders in the Sky, I believe I can Fly, Don’t cry for me Argentina, that sort of thing. All with thrashy guitars and shit.
Unfortunately, the gig was soured slightly by the pit. I don’t mind people jumping about and so on, and my tolerance for this sort of thing is usually quite high, but I got the impression that the pit contained less a group of people enjoying the music in a heavily physical way and more a bunch of wankers being twats. It got ridiculous- during the verses of the songs, the twattier ones (who take their shirt off to prove out totally hardcore they are) went around motioning to clear an empty space, so that when the chorus kicked in, they could all run at each other as fast as possible. They must have really wanted to mosh to the theme tune to The Spy Who Loved Me (“Baby, you’re the best” – that one).
Hilariously, they misjudged the start of the fast bit a few times, but started moshing anyway, so what I ended up seeing were a bunch of people running at each other and going mental, but to really slow music.
It was a good gig though – bit of a shame though that they didn’t play their version of “These are a few of my favourite things” with the start which plays to the tune of Bad Religion’s Generator.
![Album art for 005 Warped Tour Compilation [Disc 1] by Dropkick Murphys](http://jamesomalley.co.uk/blog/wp-content/lastfm_album_art/2005_Warped_Tour_Compilation_[Disc_1]^Dropkick_Murphys.jpg "Dropkick Murphys - 005 Warped Tour Compilation [Disc 1]")
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