before you decided to be so spiteful and rude.

I am naturally wary of attempts to create an umbrella of folklorism under which The Burry Man is the natural cousin of the Hastings Jack-in-the-Green, and the Cheese Rollers of Cooper's Hill drink from the same cup as the Britannia Mills Coconut Dancers - and all to an Eliza Carthy soundtrack. I've no problem with any of these things as disparate entities - even Eliza Carthy to whom much respect - but to bring them together in such a way implies a common continuity of purpose that just isn't there. To juxtapose the more fanciful creations of post-modern fantasy-fakelore (and evident revivals) with the very real McCoy of the Allendale Tar Barrels is, in my opinion, not only entirely misleading, but disrespectful to the very ordinary people who keep these going and to whom they ultimately belong as living, breathing entities. In so saying I'm not being spiteful, rude, crabby or narrow-minded, I just feel that any study of folklore and folk custom requires the aforementioned dignified objectivism that seems, to me, to be entirely absent from this project.

Whilst in my Sinister Supporter guise at this year's Morpeth Gathering, a rather charming young Goth couple congratulated me for my evident pagan presence. Happily they didn't seem at all disappointed when I pointed out that far from being pagan the Green Man is one of the earliest indicators of the Nature / Nurture dialectic deriving from strong Gnostic undercurrents in the theology of the medieval church and that its presence in the Folk Consciousness is entirely due to the Post-modern Zeitgeist as engendered by the likes of John Michel (feature in a recent Fortean Times) and the ongoing influence of The Wicker Man etc. Culturally, these things are crucial; as is The Museum of Folklore; as is the work of people like Wyrdstone whose choice of folkloric images is a key signifier of the nature of his music. However, we're in the realm of very deliberate revival here, existing at a secondary or tertiary remove from the source; as such it threatens us with the notion of a bland consensus which has always, alas, been the unfortunate flipside of Folk. In this sense the Wicker Man phallic-symbol Maypole is just as twee and sanitised as - er - This (that's Staines Morris in case you don't recognise it at first!). Remember, the customs are not Folk in and of themselves; they are defined as such by outsiders.

Anyway, but here's another very choice piece of YouTubery from Ottery St Mary:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEsRfcA5dts

Folk? Hmmmmmmm....