Spring is Here, Life is Skittles, Life is Beer!

I have been thinking much lately of the sparkly eyes of Martin Lindridge, multi-coloured hank-ied and braceleted, singing this song half conspiratorially and definitely mischievously as the words have inevitably frothed into my head every time I have seen blossom of late. And regardless of context, be it my own blog or my canal contribution to a parish newsletter, I can never resist talking about spring.

Spring arrived in Canberra in a white dress and has been merrily playing tennis with winter for the past two months. Pear and rowan blossom erupted in late August (think February, you northern hemisphere-ers) and in the sunshine one bravely left one’s coat at home and stepped out, squinting in the sunshine. It gathered pace, then the first of September broke, which is Wattle Day in Australia. Wattle is a glorious golden tree or shrub with little yellow puffy balls of flowers in huge clumps and there are numerous varieties. I’d been wondering what the hell all this yellow stuff was on my morning frosty runs in August; hatted and gloved, then on the First of September, when we climbed the mountain at Camel’s Hump in the Tidbinbilla range and enjoyed the first t-shirt day of the year,  he sun shone and golden wattle in full sun smiles choked the blue hills and grey trees. Another colour to Australia’s palette.

Giddy with excitement as cherry, then apple blossom and then wisteria swelled in pinks, whites and purples, I continued through Canberra with that sort of …stomach smile you have, when you are perfectly happy and all around you is so glorious that a face is not enough to smile with as the joy pierces down deeper. Floriade – Australia’s largest flower festival – opened, and as I wandered through purple tulips and pink petunias, I was veritably drunk on fragrance, weeping and throwing my head in the beds.

Chaps; to imagine Floriade, combine the following. Take an English Stately Home of either the National Trust or English Heritage variety and pinch out its glorious planting of formal beds and kitchen gardens. Now double your quantity. Make some of the designs and patterns playful (like a ‘daggy knit jumper’ – google that) and then homages to nature, like reflecting the shape of the blue Murrumbidgee river in forget me nots and pansies. Now add a music festival, complete with stage, numerous food stalls, varieties of bars and pretty stalls that sell glorious hippy Indian silk skirts, and mix together thoroughly until you have a riot of colour and pleasant seating from which to enjoy it. Add craft stalls. Serve on a platter of a local town park with sweeping views down to the lake and Mount Ainslie, Mount Majura and Black Mountain, and some bats in the trees. Scrape off the National Trust charge of £22.50 per fecking adult and some grumpy woman in the café selling you overpriced dry sandwiches, so entrance to the whole event is free and you can go in and out as often as you want. Allow this to continue for a month. And there you have it! A Floriade!

I felt very luck to enjoy two springs in a year. I went home in May and was drunk on bluebells, singing and dancing in the May-o at sunrise with New Moon Morris and thoroughly proud to declare ‘this is the one thing about being English that is not tainted or divisive!!’ I danced up the sun in England, then inquired about doing such a thing in Australia. Now our first of May would equivocate to the first of November. By which point it would be hot as shit. Wattle day at the start of September – equivalent of the first of March is still a bit dicey, weather wise. So instead, Surly Griffen hoped on Canberra’s sixth month old light rail to give it its proper christening and dance in the spring in every suburb off Northbourne Avenue.

We gathered in Gunghalin, at the top of the line. Dressed in black, with our brightly coloured green and blue baldrics, noisy bells and eye contractingly white hankies (washed clear of Tasmanian winter mud), we attracted attention. Remember, despite the National Folk Festival happening right here in Canberra, it’s behind a paid fence and we are the only Morris side in the Territory. Surly Griffen don’t dance a lot round the city. Our pubs aren’t accustomed to us turning up to dance of a weeknight, there are precious few greens, and we haven’t invited other sides to mob our town centre and dance with us for national events. All this merely suggests the scope we could yet do, which would be marvellous. But overall, dudes with bells and hankies outside your local shops, is not a common site. We danced, and we did it vigorously, then we hopped on the light rail. Someone overconfident with their balance began playing melodeon, which farted to a wheezy halt the minute the train set off and twenty four sets of bells jingled in startled unison as we all lurched aside before grappling at bars and straps to hang on to. This was very funny the first time it happened; hysterical after the fifth as we never seemed to learn to hang on to something as the train took off. And then at the appropriate stop, we would shuffle and jingle out, line up on the platform, and do a couple of dances before the next train.

This all went marvellously until we got arrested.

Hyperbole is such a wonderful technique. There was indeed an announcement over the platform radio stating if we persisted dancing, the police would be called, which was followed by another stating that they had. We took this all in jest, until a chap in a hat came over and said, no really, it’s not safe to take up so much room on the platform. Er… They say Australia is the nanny state. After that we got a two man escort for the rest of our expedition which marshalled us on and off the carriage (we invariably went in and out of whatever door we felt like instead of where we were told), still couldn’t make us hang on when we departed platforms, and also walked us over pedestrian crossings to safe dance spots.

This was all very amusing, and next time we’ll know to put in an official application and see if we can get a horse guard. But it was all good fun! Our squire was good enough to focus on a few of the Cotswolds and border dances that I know, so we did Tides a-Flowing, Vandals, Highland Mary (that’s a vigorously self-identifying hanky dance) and even an Upton stick. We left off at last to do what all good Morris dancers do, which is go to the pub and ate and drank heartily, then finished up at the last stop on the light rail to be sure we’d brought in the spring at both ends. I don’t know if it was really a spring tribute, rather than celebrating a geeky love of trains, but it was a lovely day and the blossoms smiled. I’d have felt more the pagan folk of spring if we’d burst into hal-an-tow, but perhaps I can only do that in green lands.

So how does it compare to England’s green fields? A bit less pagan, yes. And while I love me winter tatters for their added gravitas, I do miss the flow of my wine red skirt and shaking ribbons in people’s faces, panting between skips that if one touches them, it means they’ll fall in love. All this does bring home to me how unique New Moon is, because despite Morris dancing for four years, it’s entirely not prepared me for… Morris dancing. But I do love that New Moon make up their own dances, based on border, north west clog, garland dances and whatever the hell else they feel like, with a broom. It is lovely to join in another side and dance with them; hence I’ve begged to perhaps learn a bonny green garter to pay just one tribute to Cotswolds, but I agree, you don’t want to make a habit of it. I jest, but when New Moon take the street at Rochester, Tring, St Albans, Oxford, Swanage, Kimpton and Wimbourne, the audience are going to see something different. Perhaps that is it – English Morris is for the audience, for the performance. Australian appears to be for the dancers. Across the whole continent, we learn the same dances and dance them together. We hear the bells far off and gravitate towards each other across deserts and dry creeks and hold hands, dancing for ourselves, to remind ourselves we are strangers in an ancient land, whose people, marked in white ochre, watch in fascination as we paint our faces green, plant apple trees and march slowly towards the saplings with burning torches to shout at them. What must they have thought, the first time they saw it.

Morris over: the BBQs arrived. Then a spring bank holiday, but on the 7^th October, if you can imagine – it’s the equivalent of our early April Easter weekends which are invariably shit, in which the weather reached 27 degrees! And what a glorious weekend it was! Yates and I started with Nightfest at Floriade, watching live bands, drinking beers and eating tandoori chicken. Then a super industrious Saturday took us to Epic farmers’ market in which I, at least, enjoyed breakfast oysters, then a trip to Mount Majura vineyard for an incredibly generous wine tasting, in which we bought…a fair few deliciously rose petal hinted bottles of Riesling, then strolled leisurely along the lake under the trees and watched England win the rugby in a pub. Sunday, we both chased our respective running goals, Yates beasting himself up Black Mountain – which sounded brutal, and me merrily cantering around the park – turns out I’ve been doing a 4.3K run for months. Then I put on a BEAUTIFUL silk skirt and spent the afternoon lingering in the sun at Floriade, with a glass of wine, listening to the music. Later that evening we went to a friend’s house for literally THE NICEST chicken I’ve ever eaten and watched a possum in their cheery tree, while we drank wine. On Monday we cycled around the Eastern loop in the dappled shade and entered Jerrabomberra wetlands, that in between marking books in E6, I would stare at longingly on googlemaps in the Aylesbury winter before we moved. We stopped for a picnic of fine duck and pistachio terrine, smoked salami, bread, apples, home-made guacamole and a very fine cheese that a cheeky fucken raven stole from us. Saw an egret, watched an eagle. After five solid days of smiling, which, incongruously, began in an unlikely little garden in a bus depot in Tuggeranong while I ate my lunch in the sunshine with little blue fairy wrens capering at my feet and wattle birds and rosellas flitting above me, my face was quite sore, and relief came on Tuesday when it rained, and a more gentle, background contentment settled in my intestines in place of all this heady, dizzy joy.

But I must take you back to an amusing observation I made on the Sunday. As I perched on a stool, in a hat, with my pretty skirt and glass of wine, I watched all the pretty people. Floriade draws people from all over Australia and whole extended families flock to Canberra, dressed in their finest, to gape at the flowers, ‘looking where the lilies blow,’ and picnic on the shady banks of the lakes. It makes you realise Canberra is not as diverse as you think, when whole families in gloriously beautiful saris spread out tangy scented feasts on the grass. And while looking about for my next favourite sari, I saw some lovely looking ladies in a variety of beautiful dresses, some even in high heels.

And I …tensed. See, I’m British. I apologise often, but I can’t help it. And I know bloody well, that if you have a gloriously sunny day that is getting rather on the warm side, lots of wine and beer readily available, and people dressed up to the nines at a free event there’s only one thing that can come of this.

A fucking fight.

So I winced. I tried not to look at the pretty dresses, or unwittingly attract attention with my funny eye that could be misconstrued. I waited for hostility to vibrate in the air. But it never came! I’m in a country where people can bloody handle the sun with their drink. This isn’t the moat of Rochester castle on a warm Spring Bank Holiday where shit is kicking off in three directions at once and the safest thing to do is get your bells off the street and go down a bottle of wine in the Italian so you can re-emerge as the new scariest thing in town that night. This isn’t an Essex rural pub garden with a little beer festival on, where everyone’s got their guns out and won’t put sun cream on or drink a bit of water between pints, until you’ve already nearly got caught up in one fight on your way back from the loo and you’re about to enter another as you lunge for the taxi you booked that some idiot is trying to get in. This is a nice place. With nice people.

I’m happy here.