Today’s Independent has an article about pagans and Goths getting involved in Morris Dancing. My initial reaction to this was that it was going to be a hatchet job much like their treatment of Eastercon, and I have to admit that regardless of any other qualities of the article, I find it hard to take it seriously when it contains cheap shot lines like this:

“Look at it coming up,” says a female voice, and she’s not talking about her partner’s big stick: the sun is beginning to burn orange through heavy grey clouds on the horizon.

Having said that, the rest of it doesn’t look too bad, and I’m pleased to see that there appear to be Morris groups that are actually engaging with what they do and trying to make something modern and vibrant out of it rather than simply looking back on ancient traditions. (This is the neo-pagan in me coming out, can you tell?) I particularly like this comment:

There are radical politics at work too: he sees the dance, and “neo-pagan carnivals” such as the Rochester Sweeps, as a way of resisting the “complacent nostalgia” of Englishness “founded on the detritus of imperialism, Christianity, racism and xenophobia”. His England has more primitive, inclusive roots, and for him the morris is a way of expressing that.

The “he” in this case being Philip Kane, founder of the Wolfshead and Vixen Morris side. His is a sort of Englishness that I think I can get along with (though goodness only knows what some of my American friends will make of those blacked faces).