Five words from oursin

[sollers]

Yikes! How long have you got? Any one of these can have me talking for hours on end. OK, I'll try to keep it brief.

Morris

Historically I don't go with the "Moorish" thing. There are strong resemblances between English folk dancing in general and folk dancing in the Canaries but I don't think that works. Most Morris dancing is fundamentally generic folk dance, though Cotswold Morris has a lot of 16th century courtly dance elements.

Main divisions:

Cotswold: white flannel trousers and skipping about. Harder than it looks, which is not very satisfactory.

North West Clog: dates largely from the Industrial Revolution - miners and mill workers. Danced in clogs with wooden soles and leather uppers, leather protectors on the soles of women's clogs, irons on the men's clogs. Many of the dances were originally danced in processions, I think mostly associated with Whit Walks.

Border: the rag coats were originally ordinary coats turned inside out so that the rags and tatters sewn inside for extra insulation were visible. This with the blackened faces was for disguise as begging (which is what the dancing was originally for) was illegal. A lot of whooping and bashing sticks. Great fun.

Molly: not strictly Cotswold but with a lot in common with Border. Mostly the eastern part of England, and originally restricted to the Christmas - Plough Monday period. Dances were ordinary country dances, but again there were disguises to avoid trouble over begging. "Molly" relates to the cross dressing aspect; clothes worn are often garish or outlandish.

Both North West Clog and Border are important parts of my life. I've been to places I wouldn't otherwise have visited, had some great musical evenings and now am tied into the most wonderfully traditional Christmases. Plus, superb aerobic exercise and (in the case of Border) a spendid opportunity to work off aggression.

Folk music

We are the folk. This particularly applies to folk song, which in the circles I move in includes a lot of 19th century songs relating to work. It's collected something of a right wing label but most of the songs I've noted down are heavily pro workers, anti bosses. It is also acceptable in those circles to write one's own, often using existing tunes, and I am very pleased with one I made about a miner.

As for music, I cannot really argue with the family's description of me as "one of nature's drummers". Since learning to play the bodhran I have bought more drums than I can keep count of, including a snare drum, a couple of djembehs and three dumbeks. The latest of these is a very nice traditional beaten-metal one with a lovely tone that only cost me £20. If I'm around a session and don't have a drum I get very fidgety, though last time I got by using flamenco clapping. I keep on trying with the fiddle but I don't practice consistently enough.

(The so called) Dark Ages

I shall really have to rein myself in here. The Continental term "Late Antiquity" is much better, because it conveys the continuity between the Romans and the Middle Ages. My favourite example comes from Sidonius Apollinaris: he tried to live like Horace (though Horace never had a fireplace that smoked) while the king of the Visigoths lived a completely medieval lifestyle, including church service first thing in the morning. The biggest problem with the time isn't that it's "dark" in the sense of "we don't know much about it", it's "too much information, hard to assimilate". One might say that Britain was obscure at the time, but Britain was fairly obscure throughout the Roman period - the only mention of Carausius, for example, is in a panegyric; the totality of references in classical writers to Roman Britain, including inscriptions on tombstones (a very large item) only comes to a couple of hundred pages.

Aging

We hates it, preciouss, we hates it, and as far as possible we doesn't do it. Hair has no grey, wrinkles are minimal, learning power seems unabated. I have inherited good genes from both sides so neither look nor sound my age, which is good. What infuriates me is stereotypes, particularly about coming to terms with new technology - I'm more sussed than colleagues half my age. When admitting to my age, I also find that people have not come to terms with the fact that I am from the 60s Generation; forget Vera Lynn, think Bob Dylan.

Folk music and Morris dancing have played a part in fending it off. Oddly enough, the key moment was neither my 50th nor my 60th birthday but in 1999. I had been looking forward to the total eclipse since the early 1950s and initially had an anticlimatic feeling of "What do I do with the rest of my life?" However, it was Sidmouth that we set off from to see it (40 odd miles on the back of a motor scooter) and it was that year at the Folk Festival that I became a founder member of Herbaceous Border (a scratch team, festivals only) and wrote and sang my first song. The best thing to keep aging at bay is to do new things, as I kept telling myself during a gale in the middle of the North Sea. Taking a dog for walks has also been shown in experiments to slow down, and in some cases reverse, the process. Particularly when I have to break into a sprint while wearing walking boots to catch up with the little so-and-so.

University Challenge

My 15 minutes of fame and then some. Again, it would take a lot of space to do it justice; suffice to say that even though the documentary made me out to look a bit nuttier than I am, I was happy with it.

They kindly sent me a DVD of my original victory, and it totally freaked my younger daughter to see me younger then than she was while watching. In those days it was taken for granted that the team captain would be chosen from one of the others - there couldn't possibly be a female one. One of the others and I had rituals, including an undertaking to dance a polka round the floor if we won a game - we revived that for the 40th Anniversary series. I have to say that Bamber Gascoigne was not really replacable.

A memory has just forced its way in: I missed the question on "what do the initials stand for in REM Sleep?" The team captain suggested "Ralph Edward Montague?" and at the next psychology tutorial both I and his fiancee were on the carpet - her for not having eddicated him properly.