#i need to take a ferry across to ireland so i gotta go to north wales anyway so might as well make a party of it

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

your posts about English folk culture being treated as esoteric within England reminded me of a conversation I had with my dad relatively recently. I was complaining about how much I hated doing scottish country dancing in P.E every year in school and he, having grown up in London, mentioned that he never did any kind of folk dancing in school and it really surprised me.

Having an Irish family and growing up in Scotland I just assumed that folk culture would be a big part of national identity in England because it def is in Ireland and scotland. I mean I grew up in the city and I went to a Catholic school where a lot of pupils didn't come from Scottish backgrounds so I'm sure my experience would be different from somebody who grew up in a smaller town or a rural area, but my school still dragged out the girls who could sword dance every year on burns day y'know

Also now I'm wracking my brain trying to remember all the English folk songs I know and realising that it's comparatively few next to the hoard of Scottish, Irish and American folk songs I've accrued over the past 2 decades. That's definitely partially just due to being connected to the cultures those songs come from and that American folk songs are generally quite a bit younger than the scottish & Irish ones, but it's still not something I've ever really thought about

yeah absolutely. it's something england -- and probably urban england and london especially -- has really lost touch with. a lot of my friends and colleagues are irish, and when the topic of things like irish dance comes up, it's always like "oh yeah i did a bit of that as a kid, everyone did" or "yeah i learned the whistle, obviously, but i stopped when i was eight" -- but there'd be no obviously about that here (even when people learn the recorder at school, it's not often trad tunes they're learning to play!)

i don't know if this is to do with the proportion of the population that's urban vs rural in england compared to ireland or scotland (not sure where wales is at with this, they have a strong song tradition but i don't know much about the welsh equiv of trad dance music nor tbh enough about the song tradition to say anything meaningful on the topic), or if it's a "survival of trad culture to spite oppressive dominant cultures" thing so england lost it due to lack of need to defend it, or if it's predominantly a class issue (but that wouldn't wholly explain schools/the national curriculum, particularly at primary level)... i think there's a lot of factors at work

but it's something i do notice because i spend time in those irish-dominated spaces where the attitude towards trad music and dance is so different. but then those are also often irish language communities, so they're specifically irish communities that are interested in their cultural heritage, and maybe that's not representative of the whole country. still, it feels like even people who aren't interested and haven't carried that interest through to adulthood were exposed to it in childhood in a way that many english people weren't because our equivalent traditions have been relegated to this very niche, marginalised (and potentially very rural) status