The new year is almost upon us, and it’s time to dust off the taffeta dress and tartan sash and sally forth to the annual reel. No doubt you will have received a lovely stiffy in the post some months ago. Reeling, known to neophytes and the non-U as Scottish country dancing, is, I believe, one of the last indicators of poshness in this country. Unlike skiing, riding or shooting – which you can, of course, learn if you have enough money – reeling is decidedly not about the dosh.
There is absolutely nothing flash about reeling. It’s the entertainment equivalent of an old Barbour
While it is true that those who own the biggest estates in the country go in for reeling, its aesthetic is one of pared-down utility: a back hall in a grand house or a church basement, a band of local fiddlers and a piece of dry chicken for supper followed by a crumble and some bad plonk to wash it all down. There is absolutely nothing flash about reeling. It’s the entertainment equivalent of an old Barbour.
To the outsider’s eye, there can be nothing more bizarre than watching a room full of gentry and aristocrats – some of whose male participants are dressed in skirts with knives in their socks – fling themselves around a room in arcane formations. To the initiated, it is perfectly normal to hold sweaty hands with mere acquaintances after ‘setting’ (leaping from side to side) to them minutes before. When I once told an American ex-boyfriend about the annual reel I went to in Scotland, he laughed with such derision that I became rather affronted. I don’t reel much anymore, but if I heard the strains of a fiddle, I would grab the nearest male arm I could and swing involuntarily round like a dervish.
Spending every Christmas holiday at my grandmother’s house in south-west Scotland, our annual reel was the All-Ages dance in the Murray Arms pub, our entrance observed by the Scots locals with some jeers since reeling is about as Scottish as the Queen Mother. Decked out in our family tartan sash and regulation taffeta sack, I waited anxiously to be asked for a dance. When, inevitably, no suitor appeared, a kindly red-faced middle-aged gent in tartan trousers was called upon by my grandmother to squire me around an Eightsome Reel or the Dashing White Sergeant. Embarrassed though I must have been, I remember the watchful gaze of the elders. No other teenage parties ensured that each of us was included.
Reeling was the only dance I performed as an adolescent that was not a prelude to some kind of sordid sexual encounter. Intergenerational and innocuous, it was firmly pinned in by a social structure that struggles in a dark disco.
Sitting atop that structure are the royals, who are, of course, extremely partial to a good Strip-the-Willow themselves. This royal warrant of sorts cements the practice in the public imagination as a rarefied, trad pursuit. Perhaps it was Queen Victoria and Prince Albert who, heading north on acquiring Balmoral in 1852, really kicked off the idea of Scotland as an imaginative hinterland to be mined. With their perfect symmetries, the reel expressed the world of courtly intrigued and social order.
But that world of rarefied, courtly know-how is in modernity’s crosshairs. In 2023, the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society decreed a new etiquette for reeling that aims to make it ‘inclusive’, ‘regardless of sexual orientation and gender’ by doing away with the necessity to keep strictly gendered lines for the dances. Such posturing at inclusivity may have netted some publicity, but reeling is nothing if not resilient, stubbornly maintaining its logic in traditional choreographic structures. Tonight, I hope that the reelers maintain their Highland apparel, dance cards and courtly gestures, and that another young girl, standing in the corner in a taffeta monstrosity, may be asked to dance by a kindly gentleman in a kilt. That’s the reel thing, after all.
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