My Motley Meanderings

I went to another good Phoenix Ceilidh last night; sadly it was the last one until October. The band were the excellent Hekety from Leeds. Women outnumbered men by a small but significant margin and I think the only time I failed to get a partner for a dance was when I was queueing at the bar.

It quickly got very hot and sweaty due to the warm weather. I was worried beforehand that I might run out of energy due to having given blood the day before, but if anything I felt fitter than I did last month and could probably have gone on for another hour. Slightly bemused that although I still very much regard myself as a novice, more than once people pointed at me and said, "he knows what he's doing," or complimented me on my ability to remember the steps of a dance.

We did one rather unusual and entertaining dance that had something to do with Australian politics - the person in the middle of three rows of three was 'the prime minister' who everyone else danced around and interacted with in various ways, then there was an 'election' and a different row progressed into the middle.

Next Saturday I'm off down to Antrobus for a ceilidh run by All Blacked Up.

After work on Friday I drove down to the_magician's place near Heathrow. There had been an accident on the M6 in the afternoon and the matrix signs were still making their proclamations of eternal doom ('long delays J16-J13' etc), but it had all cleared by the time I reached it. Incidentally, the_magician has agreed to be my co-driver/co-navigator/photographer/evening entertainment organiser for the Around Ireland Rally.

On Saturday morning we paid a visit to B&Q, unsuccessfully attempted to fix a leaky central heating pipe (hampered by the fact that the system is so bunged up we couldn't drain the water out of it), and had a look at some loose guttering, before rushing over to fifitrix's house west of London for an Odyssey 2010 committee meeting. I'm not exactly sure yet what I'm going to be doing for Odyssey but it sounds like I will have fewer responsibilities than I had for Orbital. I left at 2:45PM because I wanted to get to Poynton Ceilidh near Stockport when it opened at 7:45 - the website warned us to get there early because they only let a maximum 110 people in.

After a fast run up with only a couple of brief stops and one misread signpost, I arrived at my destination at about 7:55. It turned out that I needn't have rushed because it started off very quiet and never got really busy. Apparently there were two other ceilidhs going on elsewhere that had drawn a lot of people away. It was a friendly crowd with a reasonable mix of young and not-so-young dancers. At the start of the night there were more single blokes than single women but the ratio evened out later on. I sat out the first dance, then on the second one a girl came up and asked me to dance. After that I was lucky the rest of the evening and didn't get turned down once. The dance floor was fairly small and I imagine it could get pretty cramped if they had the full 110 people in and most of them were dancing. I was slightly disappointed that the bar felt it necessary to charge 40p per pint of tapwater, and briefly considered refilling my glass from the sink in the gents. Overall it was a good night with some fun dances. I'm not sure if I'm getting worse at dancing or getting better at noticing when I've done something wrong - some of the early dances were a bit of a mess but they got better as the night went on and people got into the swing of it. A couple of people did comment that I had 'obviously done this before.' I particularly enjoyed a rather silly dance that involved the gents from each set linking hands and dashing around the room to meet the ladies from another randomly-chosen set, then the ladies doing the same, trying to end up with matched sets (as opposed to eg. eight men in one set and none in another) before the next step of the dance.

Poynton is a fair distance away from me (it's actually in Cheshire) and I think the shortest route unfortunately involves negotiating Stockport centre, but I reckon I will go again. While I was there I picked up a flyer for a "Grand Ceilidh" in Antrobus next month - that's even further away than Poynton but it's a decent run, nearly all motorways, so I might go to that one too. On the way back I was feeling rather too smug about the number of miles I've done recently without any problems other than the sticking speedometer needle, so Fenchurch decided to start misfiring and cutting out on the M60 (the Manchester ringroad) while the rev counter went haywire. The engine never quite died completely though and I managed to nurse her the thirty miles or so home. I had a look under the bonnet this morning and found the fault in a couple of minutes - one of the wires to the coil had broken inside the insulation just before the crimped connector so it would have been making intermittent contact as the engine vibrated. I was sure it would be something simple like that - there's no computerised engine management systems to go wrong on these old engines.

Speaking of electronics going wrong, I thought my new 500GB backup disk had died because first it kept freezing, then it wouldn't even spin up. I tried swapping it into a different Firewire enclosure and it worked fine again. Either the enclosure or its power supply has died. I have had it for several years and it always worked fine with the 120GB disk it came with but when I tried putting that one back in it would no longer spin up either. Perhaps the new disk put a greater load on the power supply or something.

This past weekend I visited Edinburgh. ( Read more... )

Phoenix Ceilidhs of Horwich was brilliant. It had a completely different atmosphere to the Manchester one. There were probably a couple of hundred dancers there of all ages from five to seventy-five in a large church hall with a stage, a dance floor, a bar, and chairs and tables around the outside. There were lots of couples but a fair number of singles too and the balance wasn't wildly off (probably slightly more single women than single men), plus most of the couples were willing to dance with other partners and the band did a lot of progressive dances anyway.

I almost didn't find a partner for the first two dances, but one of the ladies organizing the event spotted me wandering around looking a bit lost and took pity on me. I didn't manage to find a partner for the second two. After that I was lucky for the rest of the night and always found a partner when I needed one. When it came to what the caller said would be the last dance of the night (actually there were two or three encores after that one), one of the young ladies there saw me going round the tables unsuccessfully asking for a partner so rushed up and grabbed me herself!

The 422 band were excellent. The caller may have overestimated our skill level somewhat - several of the dances were really complicated. He would talk us through about eight steps of a dance, then he'd say, "and now we'll learn the chorus" and it would be even more complicated than the verse! Luckily everyone was there to have a good time and nobody failed to see the funny side when people got confused and tried to do it in the wrong order or changed sex. There was a dance with five couples in a set that got everyone on the dance floor into a complete muddle, and there was another one where our set gave up trying to make sense of the steps half-way through and made up our own instead!

I lost count of how many different dances I took part in - I'd guess at least a dozen. Ceilidh dancing is very energetic so I'm aching in a lot of different places today. It was definitely worth the 35 mile drive and I certainly intend to go to the next one. Unfortunately there is only one more Phoenix ceilidh this season (on the 9th of May) before they take a six month break until the next season starts in October.

Manchester Ceilidh was disappointing. When I arrived, shortly after the posted start time, the doors were still locked. The organisers arrived after a few minutes but other dancers were slow in arriving. The second dancer to arrive was a single woman. After plucking up the courage to introduce myself I spent about fifteen minutes chatting to her before running out of small-talk and grinding to a halt. This is better than average for me.

As other dancers gradually arrived, two things became clear: it was going to be a really quiet night, and nearly everyone had brought a dance partner with them. People kept commenting on how empty the place was. At its peak there were about 25 established couples who never danced with anyone else, the aforementioned single woman (who, it transpired, was there to meet a couple of friends and didn't seem particularly enthusiastic about actually dancing), a group of about six male students, two or three other single blokes, and myself.

The band took a while to arrive and get set up (in fairness, there would have been no point in them starting earlier due to the lack of dancers). The events list on the website was wrong: Pigeon English played last month. This month it was a young Newcastle band called the Monster Ceilidh Band. They seemed technically competent but were lacking something - none of the songs felt particularly energetic or fun to me, and the dances seemed a bit dull.

I got to dance once. It was a French dance; I don't remember if the caller said what it was called but it wasn't particularly complicated, fast, intimate, or exciting in any way. I stuck around until the start of the second set but no more single women had arrived during the break and it was clear that I would be lucky to get a second dance so I sloped off home early.

I think the most positive thing I can say about it was that at least it wasn't painfully embarrassing like my one attempt at going to a dance class without a partner, and I did get one dance - it looked like most of the other single blokes there didn't get even one. All in all, it really wasn't worth driving thirty miles each way for. I'm not going to give up on ceilidhs just yet after two good experiences and one bad one, but any more people who try to tell me that dances are always short of men are likely to receive very short shrift.