May Morris Morning

"It's a hard life" grinned the young dancer from Styx of Stroud border Morris side as she slogged up Stroud High Street with her trolley load of sticks, ready for the next dance display, probably in the town's marketplace, The Shambles.

Fair play to her! They'd been up since sunrise, dancing on Coaley Peak, one of the local high hill tops, along with several other Morris sides. Border Morris dancers 'black up' their faces and wear clothing that looks a bit like ragged feathers. Traditional Morris men wear white, with coloured sashes, and the sides (teams) are all male. Cotswold Morris dancers wear flowers in their straw hats. All over the peaks today, Morris sides will have been dancing in the dawn. As the T-shirts might say, if they wore anything as modern, they do it with bells on.

Who knows why they do it? I wish I'd been there to see them at dawn. I've only been up at dawn on May day twice in the twenty years since I moved to Stroud. If I had any co-ordination, I'd join a dance group. Not sure if it'd be Morris, but they do have fabulous home made costumes, and get to go to the pub a lot....

They're probably still dancing in a pub now, some sixteen hours since they started out today. May Day marks the start of the Morris dancing season, as well as the pagan festival of Beltane, which celebrates fertility and fecundity. My favourite description of Beltane is in Marion Zimmer Bradley's novel The Mists of Avalon. In this account, young handsome men dress up as stags, with antlers on their heads and run in search of maidens. You get the picture - Stag night in Prague it ain't!

Meanwhile, back at the OFSTED inspection....