Some Men Called Morris Dance For Me

What Ho Proles!

As regular readers of this blog will be aware, I’m the prospective Tory candidate for C---- N------, a lovely rural seat in the heart of England’s South East. Being a political animal, as it were, full of bright ideas on how we might improve this great nation of ours, I’m not one to hide my dislikes particularly well. Rarely does the Murgatroid lip becalm a sneer when a sneer is justified. Today, I experienced one of those mornings that had me sneering until sneers became passé. I also doubted the things we are asked to do in order to become elected officials. It made me wonder if the electoral commission might not consider election based upon birthright as it might get me out of some of my more odorous duties.

It was this morning that the town played host to the South East Morris Dancing Championships, and I was there in my official capacity to present awards to a procession of men dressed in their best cotton whites and smelling heavily of real ale and Old Spice. I was attending in the place of the sitting Labour Member of Parliament., Mr. Neville Small, who, as you might recall, I prefer not to mention in this blog on account of his taking the seat with a majority of eleven at the last election. It always astonishes me to think that the locals could have responded so selfishly to my Bentley clipping the town’s most popular nursery nurse, but, needless to say, respond they did, and never have eleven votes cost a nation as dear.

Now, unless you have been a spectator at a traditional Morris Dancing festival, then you can’t know what it means when one admits to preferring to have your leg gnawed off by one of Bill Oddie’s highly trained combat squirrels. Unfit overweight men were never meant to skip whilst waving off-white handkerchiefs and the whole thing looked both fantastically silly and unhygienic at one and the same time. Nor could I establish that every kerchief was straight from the wash but I made damn sure that if the Environmental Health are called in, I had already lodged an official query. I swear that a few of those pieces of cloth cracked a little more snappily than is normal for clean cotton.

I had to stand there for a whole hour, a grin stretched across my face, and applauding every time a fat man had finished doing is thing in the centre of a circle of other fat men, before he skipped to the side where he proceeded to clap as another fat man began to jig, whirl, whoop, and otherwise cause a ruddy nuisance. I was quite glad when my stint was up and the locals disappeared off to the local pub. It meant I could come back to the Hall, where I’m about to write a proposal to have the Championships moved out of town next year.

Until tomorrow.