I got this from my team's email list. It's British and endearing, what more do you need?



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> > Let's cry God for hairies, England and straw bears
> > By Caitlin Moran
> >
> > With its Morris dancing and wobbly folk music the
> Straw Bear Festival
> is the essence of
> > Englishness - eccentric, scary and very cold
> >
> > WHITTLESEY is a Godforsaken village in the middle
> of frozen
> > Cambridgeshire fenland, ten miles from
> > Peterborough. To judge by the simple yet heartfelt
> graffiti on the
> benches ("I love cheese"; "I
> > love carrots"), very little occurs for most of the
> year. On the first
> Monday after Epiphany,
> > however, the Straw Bear Festival comes to town - a
> ritual of which
> nobody knows the provenance and
> > which fills thepavement outside Somerfield with
> Morris dancers, Molly
> dancers, pagans, real-ale
> > devotees, freaks and a 9ft straw bear.
> >
> > You see the special sights of a group of Molly
> dancers standing
> furtively around outside a pizza
> > shop, sharing a resoundingly unpagan American Hot;
> or Morris dancers
> trying to have a quiet wee
> > behind a church, forgetting that the bells round
> their ankles work as a
> deadly accurate aural
> > tracking device at all times. Indeed, if you're
> very lucky, you will
> see the man I chanced on this
> > year, who had not only dressed himself and his
> wife in the Morris mode,
> but also his two children,
> > three grandchildren, and a big fat golden Labrador
> - who, if my ears
> weren't deceiving me, was
> > actually called Morris.
> >
> > On paper, I wouldn't put money on this being of
> much interest. Indeed,
> before I went the first
> > time I wasn't intending to. "But Molly dancers are
> the evil Morris
> dancers," a Straw Bear-going
> > friend said, by way of encouragement.
> >
> > But surely Morris dancers are already the evil
> Morris dancers? I
> couldn't really see a way you
> > could possibly up the malevolence quotient of
> Morris dancers any
> further. Unless they had clown
> > make-up, perhaps. And danced to one of Tom Waits's
> more demented New
> Orleans funeral marches.
> >
> > Interestingly, when you arrive at Straw Bear, you
> realise that this is
> exactly what one of the
> > troupes - the Pig Dyke Molly from Yaxley,
> Cambridgeshire - have done.
> With their faces painted to
> > look like Edward Scissorhands, dressed in black
> and white Op-Art
> fabrics, and accompanied by a
> > large tuba, the Pig Dyke Molly look like Dress
> Down Friday at the
> Robert Smith Academy for
> > Troubled Youths.
> >
> > At 11am on a cold, sunny day they make a slightly
> alarming sight, like
> a giant Goth gang that
> > missed the last bus home last night and are now so
> out of their minds
> with longing for White
> > Lightning that they're dancing for pennies.
> >
> > Still, it's not as if the Pig Dyke Goth Hoedown
> are alone in looking
> incongruous. At the first
> > Straw Bear I attended, in 2001, we got off the
> train just as the main
> procession reached the
> > village square. A plough decorated with flowers
> was being pulled along,
> surrounded by dancing
> > women in long dresses with ivy in their hair.
> Alongside them were Old
> Glory - Molly dancing
> > transvestites in woollen frocks with blacked-up
> faces - and the Pig
> Dyke Sisters of Mercy
> > Knees-Up.
> >
> > Milling about at the edge of the procession were
> the Witchmen, the
> Hell's Angels of Morris
> > dancers, dressed in black and amber, spiked with
> pheasant's feathers
> and wielding big sticks.
> >
> > And in the middle, of course, was the Straw Bear -
> a villager bound up
> in 9ft of straw and looking
> > like an agrarian, medieval, extremely flammable
> Darth Vader.
> > Completely blinded by his straw head,
> > the Bear was being led on a chain by another
> villager and executing an
> odd, rhythmic, stumbling
> > dance, in which a key move seemed to be
> sporadically realising how
> top-heavy he was and nearly
> > pitching into the audience.
> >
> > I can't tell you how surprised I was when, on
> taking this all in, I
> immediately burst into tears.
> >
> > Obviously I had risen before 7am on a Saturday to
> stand outside a
> Somerfield in the fens - and at
> > an event, it was sadly clear, that had absolutely
> no jerk chicken
> stalls - but it wasn't all down
> > to that.
> >
> > I think it was a sudden realisation that this is
> what, until very
> recently, being English had all
> > been about. My conception of Englishness had been
> built on P. G.
> Wodehouse and Amnesty
> > International and Radio 4 and Dan Cruickshank but,
> in fact, they were
> preceded by hundreds of
> > years of this: peasants in the middle of winter,
> without antibiotics or
> telegraphs or thermals,
> > pretending to be witches and warlocks and Straw
> Bears until the spring
> finally came.
> >
> > Whatever modern Englishness is, it was either a
> reaction to or stemmed
> from what I was watching:
> > wild drunken joy, fear, cheap, deep magic and
> cross-dressing. I felt
> like Estelle in the recent
> > single 1980 when she raps: "I touched Africa and
> came back darker/
> Knowing myself, feeling my
> > roots a little harder."
> >
> > That cold, sunny January day in 2001, I suppose I
> touched
> > Cambridgeshire and came back whiter -
> > save around the nose, which went an interesting
> cherry colour as a
> result of the unbelievably
> > potent fenland winds.
> >
> > Because if there's one reason why the Whittlesea
> (as the organisers
> insist on spelling it) Straw
> > Bear Festival continues to be a small-scale affair
> - I would estimate
> no more than 300 people line
> > the route, or wander off to watch the dancing
> displays held in front of
> pubs across the village -
> > is that it's unbeoffthescalelievably cold.
> >
> > This isn't Glastonbury, with the odd spot of rain
> in an otherwise
> idyllic setting in the middle of
> > June. This is the fens in January. You know how,
> when you see a
> winter-blooming flower in a normal
> > part of the country, you think: "Oh dear, that
> looks very vulnerable to
> the cold"?
> >
> > In Whittlesey I thought that about a potato
> dropped in the road. When a
> pie from the chip shop
> > proved not to have been heated right through to
> the middle, it
> > precipitated an almost calamitous
> > loss of heart in our group as it was the family's
> only heat source.
> >
> > Indeed, all mystery as to why the Straw Bear
> Festival had originally
> come about - it was first
> > mentioned in newspapers in the 1890s, and nobody
> knew why it occurred
> even then - are quickly
> > resolved when one reflects on the insulating
> properties of straw. My
> reading of the festival is
> > that the Straw Bear is the only warm man in the
> fens and he is
> > flaunting his warmth at a
> > collection of villagers who are trying to keep
> warm by dancing.
> >
> > The music the bands play - stomping, hearty folk,
> a great deal of it
> very fast - is designed so
> > that the musicians lose as few fingers as possible
> to frostbite. And
> the dancing - stomping,
> > hearty, ramshackle - is basically a slightly more
> organised version of
> people hopping from one
> > foot to the other to keep warm.
> >
> > And I suppose this, above all other reasons, is
> why the Straw Bear
> remains a very special event in
> > the British calendar. For, while all other
> festivals - Harvest,
> Glastonbury, Christmas, Easter,
> > Solstice at Stonehenge and the Cheese Rolling
> Festival (May 30,
> Cooper's Hill, Brockworth,
> > Gloucester) - are products of surplus time,
> abundance and celebration,
> Straw Bear is conceived of
> > necessity. It's culture as a survival tactic. It's
> art as central heating.
> >