We have no courgettes.....

Another bright sunny day yesterday and off to another lecture, this time on "The first music seller in the land", the story of the professional street ballad singer in pre and early industrial society, very erudite for early in the morning! Delivered by Vic Gammon from Newcastle University, it was very interesting. There were thousands of street ballad singers in the 17th 18th and early 19th centuries singing about the events of the time and selling broadsheets to make a living. They were a very important part of our culture and heritage. I was surprised by how many of them were women, especially with young children. I suppose it was an occupation abandoned women could do, you just took the baby with you. It was a job with a relatively small outlay, the singers either bought their ballads from printers or wrote them themselves, and could make 10 times the cost if they sold all of them. It was the commercial music of the day, and what most people listened to. Many of the contemporary illustrations show the singers with a hand cupped to the ear ( not a finger in the ear as people who want to disparage folk singers say), so this wasn't invented by Ewan McColl, but has been around for ages and allows the sound of your voice to be amplified to your ear (try it if you don't believe me).

As it was till sunny, I spent the next hour sitting at the bandstand watching various dance teams. Gog Magog Molly must be the most colourful:







If you don't know what Molly dancing is, it's from the East Midlands and East Anglia and has a very particular style. Here's a clip of Gog Magog doing the Oompa Lumpa dance.



Hexamshire Lasses dance the north west clog style, very similar to the style that my team, Yorkshire Chandelier, dance.








A nice team, and we've learnt one of their dances called Hexham Abbey.

There are allegedly only 5 traditional sword teams in the country, 2 of them from Sheffield ( Grenoside and Handsworth), and one from the Whitby area, the Goathland Plough Stots, so it was nice to see them turn up to dance.






My favourite sword tradition is Rapper, originating from the Northeast of England, and there's some great teams around. It's fast and exciting and you have to be faily fit to do it. I was part of a rapper side for a few years, but we stuck to some of the more sedate figures! Snark Rapper are always good entertainment:



When the weather's good I can sit for hours at The Bandstand watching the dancing, you get some great views of Whitby and the harbour.


Lots of people go out on boat trips - on old lifeboats, fishing boats, small sailing boats. As someone who gets sea sick thinking about it, I stay on dry land.


We'd decided to go out with friends for a posh meal in the evening, so went back to the cottage mid afternoon for a bit of a mong (Whitby speak for doing nothing much) and a pre dinner cocktail. The meal was great, and finished in time for us to get up to the Spa for the evening's concert which started at 9. But, there was already a queue at 8.30.
So we joined it and watched as the stewards counted us to work out how many of the line would actually get in. Luckily we did, and were treated to another great performance by John Kirkpatrick, followed by an hour and a half of the madness that is Les Barker and Keith Donnelly.

Les Barker is a poet. Some of his poems are serious, some are not, and it's the comedy ones he does live. Most are well known to the audience who join in. Last night Keith accompanied him on some, such as No Courgettes, sung to the tune of No Regrets. "Have you got any news of the iceberg? " a sad tale of the polar bear asking about his family after the Titanic had smashed the iceberg which they were traveling on, is one of my favourites.



But his encore was the best, "Dachshunds with erections can't climb stairs".

The concert finished round eleven thirty and then all of us including the kids with us were straight into the late night extra, where for the fourth year running we had a themed ceilidh. The festival's patron Eliza Carthy, puts a band together and they adapt a particular band's music to dance ceilidh dances to. So far we've had Abba, Queen and the Beatles - this time it was Tamla Motown's turn. It was an amazing night, one of the best so far, and if you want to now what it's like ceilidh dancing to Stevie Wonder's superstition, watch this.



Another late walk home, but beautiful clear evening, and a good view of Jupiter, which has been bright all week.