31 May 2018 - West Farleigh

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The White House pub, West Farleigh
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Our luck with the weather continued right up to the end of May when we had a beautiful evening for our stand with Boughton Monchelsea Morris at The White House pub in West Farleigh.

The host morris side take their name from the village of Boughton Monchelsea which is just to the south of Maidstone. It was originally named after the Montchensie family but this was changed in July 2003 when the local country house was bought by Roman Abramovich who changed the name in honour of his favourite football team. Of course, they are not the only local town or village to be named after a football club. We have Watering-Bury, Holling-Bournemouth, Ro-Chesterfield and Ry-Arshenal. It is strange that we don't have one called Leeds.

Due to an unfortunate series of events, the Kettle Bridge band was somewhat depleted. In fact there were no free reed aerophone players available so this left just the two drummers to accompany the dancers. This made for an interesting experience — the dancers had no excuses for not keeping in time but they really had to concentrate to keep track of where they were in each dance. It is surprising how much we associate the moves with the melody. However everyone coped brilliantly.

Boughton MonSpurs and Kettle Bridge took turns to dance, in the usual fashion. The hosts included their signature stick-throwing dance which is always a delight to witness. I am amazed that they are still allowed to perform this without "Health and Safety" demanding that gloves and helmets be worn.

For our part, we danced Aughton 8, Marston 6 (those are dances and not the football results), Sidcot, Shawforth and Annie's. Janey was not in Sidcot so she kindly augmented the drums by playing the main tune on the recorder. For our final dance, Annie's, she was joined by Michelle who sight-read the music. What versatile dancers we have!

To sign off the evening, Boughton MonEverton organised a dance that everyone could join in with. Most of the Kettle Bridge dancers participated and it was a fun way to end an enjoyable session.

Thanks go to Boughton MonBurnley for hosting the event and to our drummers Pip and Alan for pounding away on their own (mostly) for the whole evening — we couldn't have done it without them.

I will finish with some breaking news. Apparently there is a possibility that Boughton will be changing their name due to a lucrative sponsorship deal from the world's leading on-line shopping retailer. To reflect how we now buy everything, the morris side may be renamed Bought-on Amazon.

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Kettle Bridge Clogs web site by Stephen Cordery is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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