#all of my experiences are heavily biased by growing up in a very specific flavour of suburban london

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

#i feel like city english and country side english is really different #like i grew up seeing morris dances and going to local faires #the village stopped doing a its own fair in like the 80s though and only recently restarted and they stopped doing like the faire queen #stuff #although there is a picture of my grandma as it in like the 1940s #but there is still alot of folk stuff happening outside of cities is all im saying (@aphhera)

this is very true and i think probably overlaps with my half-formed musings about class and how that ties into it (in another recent post). even within cities it varies too. north london has folk (both english and irish e.g. camden has both efdss and the london irish centre), but some other parts of london have very little, for example. cambridge has folk, but oddly the majority of it in the city seems to be scottish, despite the strong english folk traditions in cambridgeshire (i am aware of the fenland morris traditions like gog magog molly etc) -- this may be a bias of the folk communities i've been part of, but i'm part of those because they were what was available/accessible to join, so... i believe newcastle has a fairly strong folk tradition, but i'm not sure on the balance of english vs other traditions (i know there's quite a big irish population there). but i think in all of these urban environments it's something that's available if you want it, but not like, universal -- it's not so much in schools, it's not a central pillar of the community, it's a tradition you have to choose to participate in and thus becomes niche

for me the only recollection i have of seeing morris dancers growing up (in suburban london) was when i played fiddle (and i think whistle?) for a children's choir at a summer festival and the act after us was a youth morris group (the Morris Minors, a joke i am just about old enough to get but probably nobody younger than me would lmao). and at the time the reaction from adults around me was very much "wow morris dancers still exist?? how weird, i thought they were long gone"

and we did country dancing at brownies, once, which others were unenthused about (little nerd me was excited about it) but never at school -- i'm always so surprised and a little jealous when people tell me they got to do it in PE. i went to one barn dance when somebody from my parents' church was celebrating a 60th birthday or something and held one in the church hall, but otherwise barn dances, ceilidhs, and equivalents did not feature. and a lot of that is being in the urban environment, and a solid chunk of it is also probably class

but of course when we're thinking about general populations, urban areas do represent a huge swathe of the population and for a tradition to be absent in those communities means it has been pushed to the margins and become a minority tradition

also the english are weird about folk culture. we are. we've relegated our folk dances and music to the zone of esoteric nerd shit that only weirdos do, and then we go looking for esoterica in the non-english parts of our heritage because we don't think we've got any of it of our own