Morris dancing and bikers - yes, it's May Day in Hastings

The Morris dancing started on the Saturday of the Bank Holiday weekend, though this year it was a little more diffuse and chaotic than last, as a result of the usual venue - Butler's Gap in George Street - being closed off because of the possible danger from a house in partial collapse in the street above.  As a result, confused Morris dancers were found here and there round the Old Town, looking for a place to do their bit.  We caught up with the ones above near the boating lake on the front.  They're of the rhythmic stick-bashing variety rather than the waving-handkerchief ones.  I'm hoping that next year Butler's Gap will be open again and we can get a better look.

Monday is the full Monty of folk battiness, with the Jack-in-the-Green procession and all and sundry dressed in green and/or wearing green face-paint.  One gym bunny we encountered in the afternoon had bodypainted the full expanse of his overdeveloped torso with green, but that may just have been an excuse to take his shirt off.  The procession wends its way through the Old Town and finally up to West Hill, where there are more jolly japes in the afternoon - including Morris dancing, of course.  You have to be a folk history expert to understand some of the allusions - go to The Merry Wives of Windsor, for example, to understand the man with the stag's head.  During the whole weekend there were quite a lot of ladies of a certain age wafting around in yards of green muslin and tulle.  They came into their own in the procession, equipped with drums or waving hankies or just mincing along in a nice fantasy world of their own, joined by a host of others, beating drums, eating fire, or wearing other strange costumes involving green.  All good harmless stuff.
 Meanwhile the bikers were assembling on the front - row upon row of gleaming chrome, and a lot of chaps in leather, wandering around, a little displaced once they'd got off their bikes, rather like snails without their shells.  Facial hair and pewter tankards seemed to be points of convergence between the green-painted folk and the motorcycle fraternity, but in fact they inhabit very different worlds, and the buxom lady element seemed remarkably absent among the serried ranks of bikes.  This slightly weird combination of events was entirely good-humoured, and the weather was such that everyone drifted around in the sunshine with a smile on their face.  Perfick, as Pop Larkin would have said.

Antony Mair