It is May Day this
coming Wednesday which is the first day of the month and I have just been
informed that it is a Public Holiday in Singapore for May Day.
I didn't know.
I am flying
back to Singapore tonight from India and I am very pleased.
May Day is an
English Holiday. They didn't invent it but they make a bit of a deal about it.
The Romans
came up with May day before Christianity was invented and they associated it
with their worship of seasons. Roman May Day was initially a festival for the
Goddess Flora who was the Goddess of Flowers.
I have been in
the United Kingdom on May Day’s before and I have witnessed firsthand the
celebrations undertaken by the English. I have seen their strange and
disturbing pagan rituals and I found them a bit dark and weird and spooky. I
couldn't help but feel an underlying sense of doom for the May Queens that are
nominated in many of the small English villages. There was a sacrificial air
about the whole May Queen thing and I found the dressing-up-in-funny-costumes
and dancing-around-maypoles a little disconcerting as well.
The Morris
Dancing was simply ridiculous.
When I first
saw the Morris Dancers I thought that they were surely lunatics and I actually
thought I was tripping. I had eaten mushroom soup the evening before I first
saw a troupe of Morris Dancers and thought that perhaps the chef had slipped in
some magic hallucinogenic ones.
Morris Dancing
is one of the funniest and most bizarre things that I have ever seen. Here is a
picture of some Morris Dancers.
See for
yourself.
I am not sure
if any of the English with whom I work in Singapore do any Morris Dancing - on
May Day or any other. I will have to ask them. I think the main event for
Morris Dancing is on the First of May however I assume that there must be a lot
of practice involved and there are also other events where they do more
dancing. This could well be other Pagan dates.
Morris Dancing
is high energy and is quite complicated. The Dancers whack sticks together at
times and they also wave about white hankies. They dance around in lines and
circles with crazed looks of absolute delight on their faces.
They are
synchronized.
Hankies are
handkerchiefs. Globally they are used mostly by women - however many English men also use them to
daintily blow their noses.
Here is a
picture of Morris Dancers whacking of sticks together. It is brilliant.
Actually it
would not really surprise me if most of the English blokes with whom I work in
Singapore do in fact do Morris Dancing. They probably have their own private
and secret Morris Dancing troupe and I can well imagine all of them dressed up
and waving their lily white hankies about. I can imagine it clearly.
Whacking each
other's sticks.
Synchronized.
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