I went to an Ancient British Festival

This is a video in slow English to help you practice your listening comprehension. I went to an ancient British festival called Floriday. Floriday is an event which happens in Helston down in Cornwall and it is hundreds and hundreds of years old. Floriday is a festival which celebrates the coming of spring. So traditionally this was a festival which arose from Celtic culture. It came from Celtic culture to celebrate the end of winter and the So when you see we decorate the streets with lots of greenery, with lots of flowers, it's to celebrate, it's to celebrate the summer. The first recorded mention of Floriday is from 1790 and every single year since then the town has celebrated Floriday on the 8th of May by having dances go through the town where people dance in and out of shops. They dance all the way through the town to this one iconic song called the Furry Dance. There are four dances, one at seven o'clock, one at ten o'clock, one at twelve o'clock and one at five o'clock. There is also something called the which I will describe more later on. The dances are made up of partners and in order to dance you have to have some kind of connection to the town of Helston. The five o'clock and the seven o'clock dances were traditionally the servants dance. So these were dances which were made to so you could dance before and after going to work. They then have a dance at midday which is for the lords and the ladies. It's for the gentry, the posh people, the rich people of the town and I will explain a little bit more about this later. The first dance is at seven o'clock in the morning. So in order to see the dance we we had to leave the house very early. I think we left the house at about 6am to get to the town of Helston and to have a good position to watch the dance begin. We parked on a street but there are also car parks. You can park in a car park but we we parked at a friend's house and when you walk into the town it was like 6 30 something like this and you could already hear the atmosphere. You could already hear that things were exciting. The church bells were ringing in the churchyard and this is such a beautiful clip I think so I'll let you I'll let you enjoy the sound of the bells. There were lots of people walking into town because lots of people like to see the first dance of the day. A few days in advance they decorate all of the shops with greenery with sort of green stuff and they decorate the streets with bunting so like flags over the top of the street. People wait to watch the dances in the windows, people wear lily of the valley flowers on their lapel. Your lapel is here on your shirt. Now for about half an hour we were just waiting for the seven o'clock dance to start. There were lots of people who were doing the same thing so the band was waiting, the dancers were waiting, people were waiting to see the dance begin. About 10 seconds before it turned seven o'clock it was very very quiet as everybody waited for the town clock to strike seven and as soon as that happened the dance began, the furry dance began. Honestly I was really emotional watching watching the band begin. So this is a festival which as a child I would go to all the time. I used to go to Florida every single year but I've not been now for for 10 years so I was really excited and when the band started I cried, I literally cried. That's why you can hear this man go, she's crying. It's true, I was, I was crying. As the band goes by you can see the mayor leads the dance so this lady with the chain of office around her neck that is the mayor of the town and behind her are the dancers, the couples who are dancing together and what they will do is when the band strikes up this kind of second melody they all switch, they all switch partners which you can see here. This dance goes on for I think it's just under two hours and the dancers will go to various different areas of the town so we were able to move about the streets and find them in different places which was so amazing. Food and drink is another really really big part of this festival so even though it's seven o'clock in the morning you can see that some people are drinking already, some people have beers or gin or whatever. It's kind of part of the day. I did not start drinking yet. First it was time for breakfast so we decided to let the dancers go and we went to breakfast at a nearby restaurant and here I had a cranberry juice and like a full English breakfast on toast, like a vegetarian full English on toast with halloumi and avocado and poached eggs, it was really good. Once the seven o'clock dance is over you have something called the Halland Howe and this is probably the craziest part of all of Floriday because this is the tradition that is most Celtic, the most kind of pre-Christianization in the UK. What you see with the Halland Howe is two things. One, you see a lot of people waving branches of sycamore. Sycamore is a type of tree. You see people waving branches of sycamore around and they are making a lot of noise, a lot of noise. They have whistles, they have horns, they have drums. The reason for this is they are trying to scare away the demons of winter. They are scaring away winter itself. You will also notice that lots of these people are dressed in costumes. Some people are dressed as hedges but some people are dressed as dragons, as knights, loads and loads of crazy crazy costumes. Robin Hood, Cornish saints as well. Somebody is dressed as the Saint Pyrrhon. They basically, the Halland Howe, the group, they move about the town of Helston and in various different places they put on a play. Kind of a play or a show with a song which covers like, honestly, I didn't really understand it but it was about like George, Saint George and the dragon, Robin Hood, the Spanish Armada. It's just various kind of historical characters all combined into this one song. Something you hear a lot during the Halland Howe is a chant which goes ogi ogi ogi oi oi oi and you might know this chant actually. Maybe you've heard this before. It's very very popular at football games for example and this is a chant which originates in Cornwall. In Cornwall we are famous for our pasties which is a type of food. It's like our national dish and we also call pasties ogi and ogi. So when you shout ogi ogi ogi it's like our national dish and people use this chant to like celebrate being Cornish, being from Cornwall. So after all of that noise the Halland Howe ends and another dance begins. This dance is the Children's Dance at 10 o'clock in the morning. Now the Children's Dance we did not go to. I did not go to the Children's Dance this year but all of the schools in the town have the Children's Dance from I think literally like five years old and they all wear white with flowers in their hair. We didn't see it this year because we went to get some food. We went to the church like the church has a little hall next to it like a building where some local women had baked homemade cakes. They were amazing. So I bought a Cornish cream tea. A cream tea is a scone which is kind of halfway between like bread and cake and you have it with a layer of jam and then some cream on top and it was really really delicious but after the cream tea we went to a friend's house to get ready for the midday dance. I mentioned earlier that the midday dance was the it's like the lord and the lady's dance so everything about it is bigger and grander. In the midday dance there are two bands that's why when you see the bands go by they have blue and black jackets. They bring in a band from a neighboring town and all of the people dancing have to wear full top hat and tails like a full suit and the ladies need to wear a hat a full length gown and opera gloves up to up to here and this year was super exciting because my mum my mum was in it my mum was doing the midday dance. We have been so excited like four weeks we have been planning we have been dress shopping we've been buying hats I sewed her gloves like everything was happening it was a really really big deal for my family we were really excited which is why at this point in the morning at probably 10am we started drinking champagne. So we we started early this is some slang but when you're drinking in the UK you're on the lash so we were on the lash from 10 o'clock okay but my mum she looked beautiful she was wearing this gorgeous floral gown with like a coral pink color and this amazing coral pink hat and matching gloves she looked so beautiful I was so excited and she was dancing with with our family friend. So for the midday dance you dance again for about two hours with a break halfway and the break happens in the garden of a nearby like it's kind of like a small manor house it's a really grand beautiful house in the middle of the village so we went to the gardens to watch them and luckily we managed to catch everybody dancing by so I will show you some of those clips as well you can listen to to the music in the midday dance there are 190 couples dancing so these couples are split into two groups so that everybody can hear the band so there's a band at the front more dancers another band and more dancers and when my mum came by she was in the first group I was so freaking excited I was so excited so you can hear me like screaming I was screaming and yelling I was so I was so excited these two groups come together in the big garden so when they get onto the lawn onto the grass in the garden they start doing a massive spiral so that everybody can fit that lasts for a little while but so many people were waiting in the garden it had an amazing atmosphere and when the dance ended for halfway everybody was cheering it was so nice it's so beautiful now after this moment when we had the break my mum and the partner she was dancing with Brett who's probably watching actually hi Brett my mum and her dance partner came to get some champagne more champagne yeah we we had champagne and we had some some food as well eventually everybody leaves the garden and the dance starts again through the rest of the town they literally dance everywhere they go on all of the streets they go to the bowling green I managed to catch a video of them as they went through the memorial the memorial archway the band leads the way with the 190 couples behind and yeah we just spent the rest of the afternoon in the pub that's what you do on floriday you just drink you just drink and um have a good time and and see people and dance and it's lovely I have to be honest I did want to video the last dance of floriday the five o'clock dance but I was in the pub I was in the pub getting pissed so I didn't film the last dance of the evening but there are some amazing videos online everyone at this point is very very jolly because they've been drinking I hope you you get the point here but I just wanted to share some some of this floriday event with you it's such an amazing festival that happens in the UK and we we sadly we do not have many festivals like this floriday is a very very special event so if you come to Cornwall in May definitely check out floriday on the 8th of May I also I'm really interested if you have a similar festival or event in your hometown where for the whole day the town is is a party um is there anything like that in your hometown write down below um practice practice your English this is a difficult thing to explain so see if you can do it um and I will read your comments and um I'll let you know if you did good I'll let you know but in general that is everything that is everything from me it was um an amazing day that just leaves me to say thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video bye