My Late Spring Vacation - Bruise the Willow

The missus and I actually planned this trip to Scotland to coincide with the missus' mother's 70th birthday. We (mostly she and her brother) planned a surprise party, complete with food, drink, a ceilidh (pronounced kay-lee) band, dancing, and sordid people from her dark, dark past.

We rented a hall...

Put together some decorations...

And had tables and tables of food and drink...

It was really a lot of food.

A ceilidh is a Scottish dance party. The band consisted of three members: a guitarist, a fiddler, and a piper (mostly Irish pipes in this case, although he did break out the bagpipes toward the end).

The sign was made by my sister-in-law, by the way, and is the name of the missus' mother, not the name of the band.

Most ceilidh bands have a caller, in this case the fiddler, who talks you through the dance steps for the particular dance ahead of time. Most dances are actually pretty simple and repetitive, so even if you struggle in the beginning, by the end you feel like an expert.

Most dances are also joyful and celebratory, and therefore exhausting. After a particularly rousing number called The Flying Scotsman I had pretty well soaked my shirt completely through and was about three minutes from a stroke. We feel fairly certain the band made up this particular dance as a means of seeing up the skirts of many ladies as they spun around in the air.

Strip the Willow is a popular Scottish dance, and the band ended our ceilidh with a rousing version that worked in everyone in attendance. Men and women line up across from one another down the length of the entire hall. Like so...


Then you (in American group dancing vernacular) swing-your-partner-round-and-round, swing away from your partner to the next person in line (of the opposite gender), swing them round-and-round, come back to your partner and swing round-and-round, and then down the line accordingly. When the whole party is in on the action, it's a long line and a whole lotta swinging of your partners round and round.

Some people get rather into the swinging round-and-round, and Strip the Willow is not without its dangers.

Um... This is the missus' arm, four full days after the party, still not recovered from the overzealous Strip the Willow dancers.

But if that's not a sign of fun dancing, I don't know what is!