June Jamboree - Tuesday 23rd June 2026

Every year we have to make the decision  whether to continue with this lovely but challenging event. No-one can deny that attendees have a magical night and if they can, they come every year - but yet again selling enough tickets - even though the minimum number was only 30, was difficult.  Despite advertising for months beforehand and 

 lots of initial interest, holidays, injuries, illnesses, babies arriving and the inevitable challenge of increased prices meant that even a week before we had only 27 confirmed guests. And only 11 of the guests were class attendees - not all of whom were fit to dance! Are we even going to be dancing? Then on the final weekend we got news of 3 more people wanting tickets and phew, we relaxed at least we'd met our minimum number.
And as usual it was a lovely, lovely night - with some huge surprises.
First was the arrival of 2 unexpected but very welcome guests - having seen that there were still tickets available they'd made a last minute decision to travel all the way from Nicosia (Facebook does have it's uses!)  -in the hope that they could join us- so our dancer numbers were suddenly augmented by 2 more RSCDS trained dancers. Starved of dancing opportunities in Nicosia they took to the dance floor at every opportunity. Ironically the very simple dances on the programme were almost entirely unfamiliar to them and a welcome change to what they were used to back in Russia. (An even bigger coincidence is that 11 years ago in Scotland their teacher was my partner for my Units 2 & 3 of the teacher's certificate!). Then, the 2 lovely young lasses, all of 12 & 14 years old, who had come (perhaps slightly reluctantly) with their grandparents - soon grasped the basics of this 'weird' type of dancing and again were glued to the dance floor. Several more of our 'non-class member' guests took to it with enthusiasm too and it looks like we will actually have a few new dancers at class next year! What a night :-) Most of the time people were on the dance floor before I'd decided what we'd dance! For the record the dances we did (in no particular order) were:-
Sheena's Saunter, Borrowdale Exchange, Waratah Weaver, Butterscotch & Honey, Dashing White Sergeant, St Bernard's Waltz, Barley Bree,  Bridge of Athlone, Gypsy Thread, The Ring of Brodgar, A Highland Welcome. I may have even missed one or two out but these were all definitively part of the evening. 
See below a few pictures of the brilliant helpers who decorated the patio, and helped set out the tables that morning, (and took them down again, what would we do without you Doros!) and just a few of the night (please if anyone has more I'd love to have them - I was too stressed to think about asking someone to take them at the time!).