Judith Proctor's Journal

 Just back from several days a Chippenham Folk  Festival. Shattered, but had a good time.

Two days before the festival, the lady who was to be calling the maypole and doing the children's morris had to go into hospital (she should be fine, nothing too serious).  

So, I got asked to take it over at short notice.

Fortunately, the original musician was still able to make it, and proved to be the best person I've ever worked with for maypole. He never had to be asked to speed up or slow down, he automatically matched the best pace for the dancers and played a bar or two extra slowly when a small child needed to cross the dance set.

It was good, especially as having a lot of adults in the set allowed me to use a greater range of dances.

We did (my granddaughter and I) an entry for Southern Star Longsword in the annual Chippenham 'Stick and Bucket' competition.  As Southern Star was founded because of a Discworld convention, we had to enter...

Only having two dancers present did not deter us in the least.  We took spare swords and buckets and trained a scratch team.  One of the team had a mere 10 mins practice before the performance!

Here's the performance - Southern Star are 5 mins into the video, but you can watch all the teams entering.  

The man in the orangutan outfit is my husband, Richard.  That's his collection costume for fesivals - he's a Pratchett fan as well...