GeekLawyer’s Blog

Geeklawyer spent last weekend in Otley Yorkshire with Harry visiting a friend and occasional Geeklawyer commenter James. The Otley Folk Festival was the, thin, excuse for a mega drinking session. While many towns claim to have the highest number of pubs per head of population, Otley can back it up. We consumed our bodyweight in alcohol (Ruthie will no doubt have a private tantrum about that).

Geeklawyer’s prejudices about folk music proved to be poorly based: we saw terrific musicians and not a one of them had a finger in his ear. Geeklawyer can’t pretend to have become a fan of folk music but now has one less prejudice to wield.

He even danced a Celdlih (pronounced ‘cayley’) with a degree of elegance that stunned all those who watched: it was a shame he had to do so with Harry - having just turned down some hot totty who had taken the opportunity of a ‘ladies excuse me’ to beg him to dance.

But even more improbably Geeklawyer discovered a bizarre fascination for morris dancing: a reconstructed folk tradition unreasonably lampooned but which is, in reality, a cunning device to evade drinking byelaws using cultural history excuses. Nice.

Examples would be the Rivington morris dancing team, a fascinating and impressively coordinated bunch and others that Geeklawyer videoed and put them on his Youtube page.

On a sour note, Jame’s initial act of worship:

Degenerated into a murder attempt when he attempted to beat Geeklawyer off the side of Ilkley Moor.