I wrote yesterday about our day out at the Sidmouth Folk Festival, and how successful and what fun it had been for the Weston Ukulele Players, aka WUPs. Sidmouth has a long promenade above the beach, the Esplanade ( or so I believe it’s actually called) and it’s along here that all the ad hoc entertainers turn up, the clog dancers, the country dance dancers, the bagpipers and jugglers, the solo guitars/ accordions/ concertinas/ fiddlers and singers. There were about forty WuPs, and they arranged themselves in a group along by the wall between the prom and the road then set to with singing, accompanied by a couple of guitars, including my husband on bass.
As ever they had an enthusiastic audience because they play and sing a great mixture of popular songs from the 60’s up to the present day. At one point a woman in a beautiful bright green summer dress stepped into the space between the players and the audience and began to jive enthusiastically. She was a wonderful dancer – I was so jealous, I would love to jive, but I’m hopeless at dancing, which is why I guess so many of my characters in my stories spin round a dance floor to the admiration of others! From another part of the appreciatively watching audience, a man in a white shirt stepped out and began to dance with her! He was as good as she was, and honestly, you would have thought they were accustomed dance partners, they were so in sync, and looked as if they were having as much fun as the uke players and the audience!
The song changed and they nodded to each other and went back to where they had been standing to begin with. I got a couple of photos, but for some reason I won’t share them. Here is an excerpt about a couple dancing; it’s from one of my stories in my self-set challenge of writing twenty stories from a randomly generated list of words. The story is fiction based on a mixture of real events but in this excerpt the main character (i.e. a fictional me) is at a disco:
The crowd seemed to press closer, dancing, shouting at each other, trying to converse despite the noise. I realised everyone was moving, and somehow I was transported around by the mass until I was on the edge of a space in the middle.
There in the centre, jiving, slowly, and beautifully was an extraordinary couple I’d never seen before. They were both very tall, he was black and wearing a lurex jumpsuit in blue. It seemed to be covered in precious stones which sparkled as he moved. He was dancing so slowly, languidly, so elegantly, indifferent to the crowd watching in awe. The woman was as beautiful as he was handsome, as tall as he, bleached , cropped blond hair. She wore black dungarees, one strap hanging down off her naked shoulder, and a gold waistcoat. They were jiving in perfect harmony as if they’d rehearsed a million times.
The music changed and everyone surged back and the couple disappeared.
I don’t know what happened later, I guess we kept dancing, had a few more drinks and eventually left the club, to try and get an all night bus, or if that failed, a taxi.
I wonder if the couple I observed in Sidmouth will reappear in one of my stories – will it be “A Brief Encounter” or true love?
Lois Elsden 