Interview with John Kirkpatrick

Interview with John Kirkpatrick
Preamble to the interview

from American Morris Newsletter Vol 24, No 1, Spring 2001

Squeezer
P.O. Box 531
Craven Arms
SY9 5WB

Dear Jocelyn,

Many thanks for your letter, and for sending the next issue of the newsletter. I was going to ask you for a copy of what I had written about women dancing [published in AMN Volume 23, #21, but you beat me to it! The word you questioned as "burnt" should have been "hurt," but actually, "burnt" is quite good in any case.

I'm so sorry I haven't returned the transcript of our interview before now. I've dealt with the specific queries you raised, and here and there made a half-hearted attempt to tidy up my sloppy language. I hope it's all clear enough.

I'm very anxious for you to stress somewhere that all this is simply one person's opinion. Obviously I have strong, passionately held views, based on my experience of morris dancing, but that applies equally to countless others too. I hope your readers don't take the recent concentration of my rantings and ravings in these issues [of the AMN] as a sign of my psychopathic desire to ram my thoughts down everyone's throat, whether they want to listen or not. If you hadn't approached me in the first place, I doubt if I'd have had the energy to express any of this stuff at all. I'm chuffed to bits that you wanted to talk to me, but I'm just a bloke who enjoys his dancing, when it boils down to it. I certainly don't go around feeling that I have access to some reservoir of secret wisdom, and I hope the accumulative effect of what is in fact quite a widely spread out body of writing doesn't create that impression. In fact, I realised when reading through our interview that I'm really a bit out of touch with what's happening in the morris world these days. Any contact I have with new developments is completely by chance. The words "old" and "fart" spring to mind!

Anyway, thanks for your enthusiasm and interest, and I look forward to the next issue, and, more to the point, any ensuing reaction, comment, complaints, etc.

All the best

John [Kirkpatrick]

Morris Dancing