Cèilidh

T.O. is back in town and to celebrate, a group from New Scotland went to a cèilidh in Teviot yesterday evening, organized by the Hillwalking Club. As M.G. and I arrived at Teviot, G.M. and C.L. were standing outside arguing with the security people. Teviot seems to have introduced a whole set of new rules that is to make the place ‘safer’, but in effect they only make the security people more annoying. They wouldn’t let G.M. in because he didn’t have photo ID on him. G.M. managed to talk his way in in the end, though.

When finally upstairs, the cèilidh had already started. Our first dance was an interesting rendition of the Flying Scotsman, or as the band seemed to call it, Flying Scotsmince. Some nedette managed to spill N.W.’s beer over N.W.’s jacket, and the floor, and I slipped on the wet floor but amazingly got up straight away and danced on. N.W. was well pissed-off with the poor girl. Another nice experience with Teviot, as they had also tried to confiscate our stuff on Thursday because the pile was in the wrong place. Apparently.

The band was, well, interesting. They seemed to have two tempos: excruciatingly slow and ridiculously fast. Some of their reels were well suitable to do strathspeys to (quite slow strathspeys too), but their Orcadian Strip the Willow was painfully fast. J.W. and I managed to do skip-change and turn people to the music until about 4/5 through the line and were dead afterwards.

The Cumberland Square Eight was nice, although I nearly lost hold of J.W. (because T.T. had his arm right in the middle rather than at the top of her back, so there was no room for my arm anymore). The Eightsome Reel was also very good. A pity that T.T. didn’t realize that his two goals of a) doing fancy things in the Eightsome Reel and b) dancing with female numpties from the audience don’t quite mix. Fortunately M.G. jumped in at times to help the poor girl through the dance.

New Scotland people asked the band throughout to play a bit faster, but they never did. After the cèilidh, T.T. and M.G. went to talk to the band. ‘You need to realize that actual human beings are dancing to your music. You couldn’t dance to this music, this was crap,’ is a rather factual quote. The band didn’t seem to care: we were the first ones ever to complain.

I guess they only play for the RSCDS then.