MORRIS MEN

My cousin-in-law (if there is such a thing) is a Morris Man. Morris Dancing seems to have grown up as a complicated yet frivolous thing for English people to do in between swigging ales and playing cricket.  You may have seen them, the Morris Men: they dress in white, wear bells, straw hats and ribbons and wave sticks and hankies in town squares in the summer, particularly at country fetes and folk festivals.

I watched them today. To the fair bellowing of an accordion and a melodion, the side performed one or two of their finest medleys - dancing round a hat and jingling their shin-strapped bells with every sprightly leap. We all sat around and applauded with that perfected mixture of polite awkwardness. Hundreds of years of English evolution, that applause took - unlike of course, the actual Morris Dancing, which is exactly the same as it was in 1514.

At one point, a Morris Man in fine voice began a song, projecting the old-fashioned lyrics out like a bedizened town-cryer. I can't think that many people were listening to the words as it seemed to be about a plowman having it away with a parson's daughter with a hally hally ho or some such euphemism.

Polite applause.

There's much to be said for traditions. I rather like it, though I do find it a bit uncomfortable. In our own family, we have some traditions which I've never understood - things we do, that no-one else seems to do, but for which none of us can remember the exact reason. A classic example (and I can hardly believe I'm letting you into this secret) is how we say goodbye to family members leaving a party. As they drive off into the night, the remaining family gather at the front of the house, and in an unexpected flourish, whip out white handkerchiefs, which we wave uproariously at the departing vehicle.

Invariably, the well-prepared driver of the vehicle also produces a white hankie and disappears down the road, waving it with a free hand from the window. Nobody knows why. No-one can remember how it started. It's just the done thing. I always found it mildly embarrassing - especially when the neighbours poked their heads through the curtains, wondering which war the Stubbs family had lost by offering an unconditional surrender.

When Tom, my Morris Dancing cousin-in-law, first joined the family, he had no idea what was going on. As he drove down the road that first Christmas night, he thought that we, as one solid unit of conspiratorial genius, were taking the mickey out of his past-time. Spectacular.