Diary - 20 June 2013 | The Spectator

The calendar of British summer events often involves a master class in surviving a deluge cheerfully, and recent years have tested that cheer almost to destruction. On Saturday it was the turn of the annual summer fair in Highgate, north London, home to Kate Moss and the grave of Karl Marx. The thin whisper of sun in the morning led many people to trundle hopefully to the square in straw hats and sandals, which proved a strategic error. The rain began as I was eating jerk chicken, watching the Whitethorn Ladies’ Morris Dancing group from Harrow doing their stuff on the central stage. The ladies, many of whom had already sailed proudly past middle age, seemed in no particular hurry, but performed their dances with agreeable conviction, their clogs clacking and streamers flapping damply in the wind. In front of them stood a respectful gaggle of small, shivering children, who occasionally broke into excited mimicry of the moves.

The English metropolitan elite has long delighted in poking fun at morris dancers, citing Sir Thomas Beecham’s dictum that you should try everything once except incest and morris dancing, but the dancers appear indestructible. Last summer my husband was camping in Oxfordshire when a posse of them appeared on top of a hill, twirling, whirling and shaking their bells in the sunlight: he admitted that it was magical. Now — in the wake of the English folk revival — they are sturdily weaving towards the margins of fashion. As I watched the Whitethorn ladies, I felt a warm rush of tenderness for their imperviousness to cheap urban scorn. Soon after, an icy sheet of rainwater descended from an awning and — using my straw hat as a gutter — drenched me to the skin.