Dancing

Austen Healey, that great English rugby player ("yes he is" - "no he isn't" - "O yes he is" - "he's useless" etc.), was interviewed recently and stated that whilst he was super fit when he played rugby, he had never achieved such super-super fitness until he entered the competition on TV called Strictly Come Dancing. Dancing he said was something else.
I believe him though my own experience of dancing was that executed not very well, usually on Saturday nights, at the local "hop" where you moved round the floor to waltzes and foxtrots holding comely young females in your arms - it was what some wit once described as "the vertical expression of a horizontal desire". It was not a very athletic physical act.
Now Morris Dancing looks to me like something really physical. The picking up of the legs at peculiar angles and the swinging of sticks, crack, crack, crack on others' sticks and all the rest of what seems to be the silliest mode of ballet ever devised by man ( are there women involved in it?).
Now people want to see the back of it. They don't want to ban it, just to see it go away. It's as if people of the modern generation are ashamed of it, like bear-baiting or cock-fighting or throwing the cricket ball (yes, I can assure you that that was once a feature of school sports).
But there still are the stalwarts who want to keep doing it, a piece of English heritage, sort of. Indeed, a film has just been made about a team of Morris Dancers and it has proved to be popular up North.
So come on Austen Healey, show us you can do this for the sake of olde England. Do what you did for the English rugby team when they were watchable ("Yes he did" - "no he didn't" etc.)
Sir Thomas Beecham had a word to say on the subject, as he did on most; he said "one should try everything once in this world - except incense and Morris Dancing."