Hi Hawker,

I suspect another part of the problem might be that you've left it pretty late in the day to start trying to get sides.

A lot of sides, like us, will already have our 2012 Summer dancing programme pretty much set by now, and it would take a very tempting and unusual offer to slot anything else in even if the date was free.

A weekend festival has the additional disadvantage that, (shock news coming up), some Morris dancers & musicians do actually do other things than Morris - so if they've got a certain number of weekends away booked into the dancing programme by now, they'll also be booking in other things (festivals they want to go to as an audience member, holidays, family events, weekends at home walking the dog & doing the garden, etc. etc.) around those 'free' weekends. Some people are also in more than one side, so will be under double the time constraints.

I'd suggest you get in far earlier - identify the teams you want to invite and start talking to them in September or October for the 2013 festival. Seriously, we restart Winter indoor practices on the first week of September, and every year we're already getting enquiries for the next Summer by then.

Also, Chippenham is a brilliant festival all round, not just for Morris but for the whole package - so give those teams you fancy a good pitch as why they should go to Bude & Stratton instead for a year, because otherwise they'll have agreed to go to Chippenham again by the time you ask them.

You're also only a week before Wimborne, which attracts a whole load of sides (including us in the past and hopefully again in the future) - they start asking in the time scales I've indicated, and if the sides you want have already signed up to Wimborne, they might not fancy two weekends away on the trot.

All of the above also explains why all of the people who are only just getting around to talking to their local Morris sides about the Queen's Jubilee weekend are going, on the whole, to be very disappointed ...