Music for your Irish party

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We thought we’d provide a few ideas on Irish entertainment. When thinking about the Emerald Isle and the entertainment that it has provided to the world, an obvious place to start is the harp.

It is known that the harp was revered across Celtic culture and Europe in the 1100s with various leaders having their own resident harpist who enjoyed a high status and special privileges. What did they have to do? As one might expect, they were expected to play music in accompaniment to other forms of party entertainment – poetry recitations or reading of psalms, etc. Alas, no music for the harp is written down from this period.

As any lover of history may tell you, Celtic culture wasn’t as popular as it used to be and the social status of a harp player began to lessen as the years wore on. No longer retained amongst the higher echelons, they took to the streets, performing as travelling musicians to the delight of crowds. Perhaps they were enjoyed too much; although the Irish harp was a symbol of the country and embraced around the world, it was now see as an emblem of resistance against the Crown and England. It was henceforth banned from the end of the Middle Ages and in just a few centuries, the Irish harp had all but disappeared.

…Well, almost. In 1792, a group of harpists travelled to Belfast for a traditional harp festival. A passionate musician, Edward Bunting, noted down the music they played and it is thanks to him that traditional Gaelic music lasts to this day; it had never previously been written down on paper (presumably because nobody ever saw the point or most harpists couldn’t read or write sheet music.)

There are less than a dozen Celtic harps that have survived from the medieval period. The oldest one is also the most famous – the Trinity College Harp, upon which the official emblem of Ireland is now based. It can be seen if you decide to visit Trinity College in Dublin and no doubt, you’ll learn even more about this lovely instrument.

Photobooth alternatives

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When it comes to booking entertainment for events and parties around London, clients often opt for a photo booth. But what if they could be improved? That’s where Staged Photography comes in!

The backdrops are what this is all about. You can pretend you’re in a horror movie, a Venetian ball, a rainforest. Pretty much any photo is possible with these backdrops. All you have to do is book Staged Photography, state the background you’d love to see on your photo and… That’s it. Come the day of your event, the incredibly immersive – “Is it 3D?” – backdrop will be unfurled and you’ll be stunned at the realism. Even more so when you join the picture later on!

Staged Photography will require a little more room than a hired photo booth. Most booths can take up a small space in the corner of your venue, while a Staged Photography takes up quite a bit more space than that. But here’s the thing, you won’t mind because you want people to notice this amazing form of entertainment. You want people to have an incredible photo taken against the backdrop that you have chosen for your event!

Just like a photo booth, photos are available almost immediately so you can take your home your entertaining snap for use however you please. Want it digitally? That’s not a problem either! A truly brilliant form of party entertainment.

Monopoly and its history

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Monopoly was originally designed to warn players about the dangers of capitalism – but it ended up celebrating getting rich.

The first version of the board game was called ‘The Landlord’s Game’ and was supposed to show the unfairness of private property ownership. It was created in 1902 by Elizabeth Magie who believed in fairer taxation and wanted a single tax on land ownership to replace all other taxes.

She thought it was grossly unfair that landlords raked in profits by passively owning land and wanted to change it.

The board game she called ‘The Landlord’s Game’ was essentially a satire and she thought that when people played it they would ‘see clearly the gross injustice of our present land system. How wrong she was, in her original version players used paper money to buy utilities and property, just like the modern game. But instead of passing ‘Go’ and collecting £200, you passed a square marked ‘Labor upon Mother Earth produces wages’ and got £100.

One corner of the board was marked ‘No Trespassing. Go to Jail’ which she said was owned by a British lord and was to signify ‘foreign ownership of American soil’.

Magie patented The Landlord’s Game in 1904 and approached board game makersed Parker Bros.. but they passed, saying it was too complicated.

Meanwhile the game spread around the country – people made their own versions with paper – until it found its way to Charles Darrow in Philadelphia in 1933. He was shown the game by his friend Charles Todd and promptly stole the idea and passed it off as his own, adding some more colour to the board and suggesting people use small household objects as playing tokens.

During the 1930s it began to sell steadily at stores until in 1935 Parker Brothers decided to buy it from Darrow for £7,000, around £121,000 in current money.

Parker Brothers added playing pieces like a shoe, a top hat and an iron, the Chance and Community Chest cards and a cartoon character who was called Mr Monopoly, which spawned the game’s new name.

Parker Brothers tried to patent the game but realized that Darrow did not actually own it.
They had to pay £10,000 to Daniel Lyman who had patented his own version called Finance.
They also tracked down Magie, who was living in Arlington, Virginia and paid her with a commitment that they would make a version of the Landlord’s Game.

Darrow meanwhile made millions, even after Parker Brothers reduced his royalties.
In 1939 when Parker Brothers eventually made The Landlord’s Game it bombed and most of the 10,000 copies were returned. Magie would no doubt have been heartbroken.
Author Tristan Donovan writes:: ‘Players looked at Monopoly and decided they wanted to be the rich monopolistic landlord’ After all who wants to be poor?

A quintessentially English game

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The game of croquet was introduced to Victorian England by John Jaques and marketed to the growing middle class via the manufacture of croquet sets, which were showcased at The Great Exhibition of 1851. Great Exhibition sets were reissued in the 21st century by Jaques of London to mark 150 years since the introduction of croquet to England.

The popularity of the game in Victorian times engendered a wave of publications. Each publication offered a different number of rules, ranging from 20 to 126! Consensus arrived in 1870 with the publication of The Conference Rules of Laws. The current Laws of Association Croquet number a modest 55, though that number climbs into the hundreds if you count the many sub-sections.

As the world went to war in 1914, Stanley Paul & Co. published Lord Tollemache Croquet. The text describes the game of the Edwardian golden age, supported by event photographs demonstrating the techniques of a sequence game (as golf croquet today), involving ‘tight croqueting’ where the striker put his foot on his ball and hit it to move the ball in contact over the lawn, sending it ‘up the country’.

Croquet illustrates hoops run from circles rounding them on a square court with 4 baulks, 6 hoops and 2 pegs (1st below fifth hoop, 2nd above sixth hoop). The player was required to hit the 2nd peg (turning peg) with the striker’s ball, thus gaining one stroke before advancing to 1-back. The end game involved a peg-out at the peg below the fifth hoop.

As croquet grew in popularity, so clubs were formed. In 1860 the first club was established at Worthing in west Sussex, followed by the All England Croquet Club at Wimbledon in 1868. A need to coordinate the activities of a growing number of clubs led to the formation of The Croquet Association (CA) in 1897; it remains today the national governing body for the sport in England and produces the Laws of Croquet for both Association and Golf.

The introduction of lawn tennis in 1875 challenged the popularity of croquet, but croquet continued to be played and perhaps benefited from the higher standards of lawn care that tennis demanded. Lawn mowers, first invented in 1830, improved and evolved to suit the leisure market.

Planning a picnic event

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‘Picnic’ began life as a 17th-century French word — it wasn’t even close to being an American invention. A 1692 edition of Origines de la Langue Françoise de Ménage mentions ‘piquenique’ as being of recent origin marks the first appearance of the word in print. As for how the French came by this new term, it was likely invented by joining the common form of the verb ‘piquer’ (meaning “to pick” or “peck”) and a nonsense rhyming syllable coined to fit the first half of this new palate-pleaser.

The first documented appearance of the term outside the French language occurred in 1748, but it was 1800 or thereabouts before anyone can prove it made it into the English language. Even then, it still wasn’t in America, it was in England.

Originally, the term described the element of individual contribution each guest was supposed to make towards the repast, as everyone who had been invited to social events styled as “picnics” was expected to turn up bearing a dish to add to the common feast. This element was picked up in other ‘picnic’ terms, such as ‘picnic society,’ which described gatherings of the intelligentsia where everyone was expected to perform or in some other way contribute to the success of the evening.

Over time, the meaning of the word shifted to emphasize an alfresco element that had crept into the evolving concept of what such gatherings were supposed to be. Nowadays one thinks of a picnic as a casual meal partaken in a pastoral setting, not as a repast enjoyed either indoors or outdoors but which was contributed to by everybody. Modern picnic baskets can be provisioned by only one cook, and no one would think anything of it — what matters now is the food be eaten outdoors.

By the 19th century, ‘picnic’ had successfully made this linguistic shift in meaning. Its history (and that of every other word in the English language) is documented in the Oxford English Dictionary.

May Day Traditions

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Nothing beckons summer forth more effectively than dancing around a pole adorned with long, coloured ribbons. The British May Day tradition of dancing around a maypole is around 600 years old and the activity often brings communities together. But what does dancing around a maypole on 1 May involve, and what does it represent?

Dancing around a maypole involves a group of dancers taking a coloured ribbon attached to it and weaving around each other, often to music. Traditionally the dancers position themselves in pairs of boys and girls before beginning their routine. The dance creates a multi-coloured pattern which creeps steadily down the pole. The dancers then reverse their steps to undo the ribbons. This is said to represent the lengthening of the days as summer approaches, but the significance of the pole itself is not really known.

At Offenham in Worcestershire, a very complex dance routine around the pole is performed on May Day every year. The first recorded instance of a maypole dance came during the 14th century in Llanidloes, central Wales, and the tradition is thought to have come from Wales and Scotland before spreading around the country. Due to the ever-changing religious doctrines of the kings and queens of England over the centuries, the maypole was seen as an anti-Christian symbol for a time, right up to the end of the 19th century. The tallest maypoles in the country are at Nun Monkton, North Yorkshire (88 ft), Barwick-in-Elmet, West Yorkshire (86 ft) and Welford-on-Avon, Warwickshire (65 ft).

There is also the hilarious tradition of maypole scrambling, which involves people trying to climb to the top of the pole. This also mainly happens in Germany and Austria. Though not always held on 1 May, maypole celebrations also happen in the States, Malta, Scandinavia, Canada and Italy, with Italians using the pole to celebrate International Workers Day too.

History of the Caricaturists

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When it comes to booking entertainment for events, one of our most popular strolling acts is undoubtedly a caricaturist. Blessed with the skill of being able to draw both accurately and quickly, with a nice comedic slant, caricaturists often manage to draw ten to twelve people in just one hour at an event! Not bad at all! But where does the art of caricature come from? Who invented it? Let’s find out…

It’s hard to know exactly when caricature started but we do know that there are examples of the form in graffiti that can be found at Pompeii. This would confirm that the style of drawing has been popular for almost 2,000 years but it’s highly likely that it has been popular for even longer than that.

In more recent times, the form was highly enjoyed by the aristocratic circles in France and Italy, with portraits passed about friends for mutual enjoyment. Leonardo Da Vinci’s caricatures are some of the oldest on record; he would seek people with deformities to use as models, hoping to offer an impression of the original that was more striking than a portrait.

The first book of caricature can be dated to 1762 when Mary Darlas published A Book of Caricaturas. The first North American caricatures can be traced to just three years before that when Brigadier-General George Townshend would draw caricatures of other high ranking officials like British General James Wolfe during the Battle of Quebec. These drawings were often highly exaggerated to elicit laughter and amusement from his fellow officers.

Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray are perhaps the two most important British caricaturists in history; they were great friends and often visited pubs together in London. Rowlandson preferred to focus his efforts on artistry and drawing members of the public, whilst Gillray aimed his pen squarely at politics, satirising his subjects to great effect.

Rowlandson and Gillray’s differing approaches to caricature are still evident today with a drawing able to gently mock a subject for humorous effect or wound them with a serious social or political point. We would rather advise booking a caricaturist at an event to dish out the former rather than the latter for the good of the party atmosphere!

No dancing

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Up until recently, you could walk down a busy Japanese street in the early hours and find many people dancing the night away. If these same people then set foot in a nightclub, what they were doing would have been seen illegal and could have resulted in jail time. Why? To find out we have to venture a number of decades into the past.

The ban on dancing in nightclubs, bars and any other public venues has been in place in Japan since the American occupation of the country during the years after WWII. The law made sense at the time, ‘dance halls’ were often a front for prostitution, which was rampant across the poverty-stricken nation. But seventy years on, why was the law still in place?

In truth, it wasn’t in all but name. During the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Japan thrived. With a high standard of living and vibrant nightlife, officials largely turned a blind eye to what some had described as an obsolete and oppressive ruling. Why could you dance into the evening but not once the clock reached midnight? The dance scene took off across the country during these years with many teens and twenty somethings inspired by western culture, fuelling numerous club openings across the
major cities like Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka.

Unfortunately the fun couldn’t last. A spate of high profile drug busts, some of which involved celebrities, as well as a hugely publicised 2010 club brawl led to a crackdown from police after a 22-year-old died. A litany of arrests followed with clubs being raided if they flouted the law. Japan’s War on Dance had begun.

Police began arresting DJs and club patrons, submitting them for drug tests, clamping down on the nightclub scene. With fierce resistance from those in and around the music industry, as well as lawyers and politicians, the law was revamped in 2015 with some nightclubs allowed to have dancing after midnight but only if the lights were left on, giving off a similar vibe to a cinema when a film plays. Those that remained darker still had to stop at midnight with illuminated ‘No Dancing’ signs calling attention to the need for visitors to bring a halt to proceedings. The solution? To head outside and continue dancing in the streets!

Thankfully the law was completely abolished by Japanese politicians in 2016, with many noting Tokyo couldn’t simply turn off the lights at midnight when the Olympics arrived in 2020. We just hope that the first song they danced to was the classic eighties number, Footloose! Kevin Bacon is sure to be pleased next time he visits Japan.

Remembering information

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The Method of Loci might be familiar to fans of Sherlock on BBC1 because Sherlock once used his ‘Mind Palace’, which was much ridiculed online. Even so, this method of remembering information is highly praised by memory experts and is used by those to whom memory is very useful indeed.

Derren Brown utilises a system for his incredible live shows whilst Simon Reinhard, European Memory Champion, showed such an effective deployment of the strategy that he was able to remember the position of all 52 cards in a deck in just under 21 seconds.

The easiest way to perfect the Method of Loci is to think of a journey that you make on a regular basis. For most that would be their commute to and from work. The trip should go past a number of distinctive ‘landmarks’ – a skate park, a memorable building, a colourful fence – which you tend to pay attention to every morning. The more memorable the place, the better the method will be.

Next you write down every bit of information that you’d like to remember. After assembling your list, you then attach a picture or symbol to each item. If you need to remember to buy a birthday card for example, you’d simply affix an image of a birthday card in your mind to the skate park we mentioned earlier. Every time you walk past, it will be instantly imprinted in your mind!

This technique may sound simple and that’s because it is, but it will still take some time to perfect.
And why is it called the ‘Method of Loci’? The reason being that ‘loci’ is the Latin for ‘places’ and the method itself has been around since around 80BC.

It is referred to in the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric, Rhetorica ad Herennium, and also features in Cicero’s De Oratore in 55BC and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria in 95CE. Considering they have been around for well over 2,000 years, you can be certain of the fact that they work!

Romantic love songs

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If you’re thinking of planning a celebration for that someone special in your life then you’ll need a special love song. If romance is in the air for you, you may want to check out our best romantic jazz recommendations, for some of the most beautiful songs and performances out there here are our top romantic music picks…

– My Funny Valentine, by Chet Baker. This song is beautiful – melancholy, heartfelt, with tongue-in-cheek humour and ending with a beautiful sentiment, this song has it all, and Chet’s delivery is the best I’ve ever heard. His simple, elegant voice brings the songs to life and then some.

– At Last, by Etta James. A classic, the audition song of teenage girls everywhere (for good reason). Sexy, sultry, powerful and incredibly delivered by Ms James.

– Teach Me Tonight, by Nancy Wilson. It’s cool, it’s classy and it’s a little bit cheeky – the story of someone who thinks they have a lot to teach a potential partner, who at first may seem unwilling (but comes round in the end…). Nancy’s delivery is just gorgeous.

– I’ve Got a Crush on You, by Ella Fitzgerald. Did you ever have daydreams about singing this song to your crush, who would be sat in the front row of the audience, gazing adoringly. After hearing you singing this song, he’d yours forever.

– L-O-V-E by Nat ‘King’ Cole. It’s like honey and butter, heated up and stirred together with lots and lots of sugar…. At least, that’s what it makes us think of! A checklist of the things that make a person special, spelling out the essence of the day. It’s love, isn’t it?