It wasn't practical to carry on, you tell yourself. With a job that meant you were missing about one practice in three, you weren't really getting the continuity that you needed from one week to the next. Yes, that's right. Continuity. That's exactly what the problem was. Wasn't it unfair on the side, as well, to have you disappearing for week after week? Yes. Of course.

But the little voice at the back of your mind admits another reason you gave up: dancing has never exactly been the greatest of your skills. And that was painfully evident in your morris dancing. Even a year and a half on from when you started, your head was still moving in the opposite direction to your body, and you were still colliding (and worse, apologising for colliding) with the other dancers. And those moments when a dance was named, and you weren't sure whether to bring out your hankies or reach for a stick, were still happening far too often.

Not that you regret a second of your 18 months as a morris dancer. You really enjoyed the camaraderie, and few hobbies would give you the chance to do some pub-bothering at Christmas, or dress up as a dead horse. And even if morris, as danced today, seemed to owe more to Victorian folklorists than anything more well-established, you still felt a certain awe at dancing the same dances that generations before you had done. Though, obviously, not quite as well as they'd danced them.

So you shove your morris kit in to a Tesco bag to give back to the side. In goes the baldrick, because it was always on loan, and in go the breeches as well, because short of a 'come as you are in the 17th century' fancy dress party, you can't see them coming in useful. The same goes for the ankle-length socks.

But you keep the hankies, because they're hankies. You also keep an immense amount of respect for Britain's 14,000 morris dancers, for having the guts, the initiative and the sheer bloody-mindedness to do something so out of step with everything, and for making it look so deceptively simple most of the time.

And, after much deliberation, you decide to keep the dog-collars.

You couldn't not, really.

It's a little-known fact that, on one day of every year, the fact that the sun rises is all down to the morris dancers.

Quite why they decide to dance, around dawn on May Day, to wake up the sun isn't clear. But if you had to pick a significant day for morris dancers, it would be May 1st. For three centuries and more, the day was treated as a bookmark in the year, that showed summer was near. It'd be a festival of celebration, even before it became linked with workers' rights. Morris dancers were part of the festivities.

But that was during the day. Where did dancing at dawn on May Day come from? You find out that, like most supposedly ancient traditions, it goes back to time immemorial, or in other words, to 1923. To 1923 at Oxford, to be precise. For centuries in that city, people would gather to see in the May dawn. Groups of students, fuelled by adrenaline mixed with alcohol, launch themselves from a high bridge into the freezing river below: all manage to survive with varying degrees of success, in a kind of natural selection for Hooray Henrys. The choir of Magdalen College sing from their bell-tower and welcome May in. So it must have seemed fairly natural for a side of morris men to join in the festivities one year, dancing in the new dawn.

For those taking part, it must have been a fairly arduous tradition to uphold after the first year. Getting up at stupid o'clock in the morning and dancing in the freezing cold and (maybe) rain can't have been many people's idea of fun. But, for whatever reason, dancing the May dawn in has become a fixture of most morris dancers' calendars.

Calendars all over the world, of course. In Australia, May Day dawn is already old news, and even though the start of May there marks more autumn than summer, morris dancers in the country have already danced up the sun. Though, you've heard of a side that preferred to stay in their beds and wait till it was actually dawn in Britain, and you can't say you blame them.

About 20 hours later, the last morris sides to see the new day will probably be in Alaska, where the sun never really properly sets for more than a couple of hours. If they're anything like previous years, the dancers there will probably be staying up all night until the sky lightens. Though they'll still be dancing.

In Britain, it really is as unearthly an hour as it seems to be. You've been up since three in the morning, and soon you'll be jumping in a car and heading off to a straight-up-squire-honest-to-goodness Roman amphitheatre, about 60 miles to your east. It's a very strange thing to do on a Sunday morning, but your conscience is salved somewhat by the promise of dancing outside a cathedral a few hours later, giving if not absolution, at least Anglican semi-approval of what you're doing.

But first, you'll be dancing at dawn, and you'll have to wait and see whether the sun smiles on your efforts. You're fairly sure it should, but then again, you never can tell.

When you started, you were worried about it all being too pagan, too English and too difficult for you. But the 'pagan' side of morris dancing turned out to be based on the flimsiest of history. And despite morris being one of the quintessentially stereotypically English activities, if you went far enough back into history, it seemed to be a European import, which had arguably contaminated Welsh dancing as well. With two potential stumbling blocks removed, that just left the difficulty of the thing.

Dancing with a side that had over a century of collective experience was always going to be a struggle. But their teaching and experience slowly rubbed off onto you, until you reached the point where you could do a few dances tolerably, pass off as a dancer of sorts, and fool some of the people some of the time. As long as they kept you away from the dance-outs that the side got paid for.

You thought you were uniquely untalented at dancing, and you're still not convinced otherwise. Every side that came into contact with you thought you were better at playing fiddle than you were at actually dancing. You couldn't honestly disagree with them. You were reassured by a relative, who'd been dancing for 33 years, who told you that, well, he was still learning.

It was a year of learning. Learning how difficult dancing with handkerchiefs was, compared to dancing with sticks. Learning that, when you clashed sticks with women, they were more aggressive than men. Learning something of the depth and breadth of morris dancing too. Learning about its regional variations. Learning a little about the centuries of tradition on which you were stepping. Learning about the ragged face-painted lunacy of some sides, versus the white-shirted traditional precision of others. Learning, from a friend who knew one of the musicians, about an unbelievably lewd, almost 18-rated British side. And then learning of a side from California which made those Brits look tame.

It was a learning experience, too, to find that you weren't as unique as you thought you were. You thought you had to be the only Welsh-speaking morris dancer in existence, but you found others. You thought you were the only morris dancer narcissistic enough to keep a weblog. You found many others who did. You thought that buying dog-collars for your legs was strange, and then found a side which danced in clerical ones. Strangest of all for you was joining an email list for morris dancers, and ending up discussing vigesimal counting systems. It wasn't a monologue.

You bought some football socks, and then strapped some bells to them.

You tucked your trousers into your socks, and vowed to get a proper pair of breeches sorted.

You resolved to learn how to sew.

You learnt what a hockle-back was, and exactly how incompetent you were at one.

You learnt to 'dance Adderbury'. You learnt, after a fashion, to 'dance Stanton Harcourt'. Bampton was a village beyond your ability.

As for your friends, well, they were going to find out anyway, so you told them what you were doing. Many were amused. Some mocked. Some were so impressed that they bought you an EFDSS poster and Morris Ring mug for your birthday.

Most were bored by the whole idea.

Your former boss found out too, though quite how he did was a mystery. When you left your last job, he wrote 'Happy morris dancing', in the farewell card. Even on your leaving day, he didn't tell you how you were spotted. Your new boss told you that there was nothing wrong with morris dancing. You felt vaguely vindicated.

Pre-empting her discovering for herself when you danced in the next village but one to her, you told your mum. It took her five minutes to stop giggling. "But why?" she asked.

You shrugged your shoulders and said that you enjoyed it. And after all these months, that's the only convincing motivation that you've found for morris dancing. Some dancers do it for the athleticism. Some, with scant regard for history, do it for the feeling that they're participating in something old and mystical. Some do it for the beer. The best, in your observation, seem to do it for the simple reason that they like it, and find that they like it more if they dance it well.

Time passes. So I might as well admit it - it's not you, it's me that's doing this. Me, this naive morris dancer, doing this thing that used to feel alien to everything I knew, but which doesn't feel so strange any more. May Day's round the corner. A new dancing year beckons for the side - my side. I'll be with them, hanging on for dances that I know, playing for the ones I don't, lurking in the wings. Quite why, I don't know, but I'm carrying on with it, because I'm still wide-eyed at it, this three hundred and sixty nine days' wonder.

"Hello Rhys, are you up for a bit of morrissing tonight?"
"Yes, I think I am, yes."
"Good, good. We're a bit low on numbers, but we can practice some rapper as well."
"Oh."
"See you at eight?"

Your heart sinks.

When morris dancers talk about rappers, then usually (but not always) they're talking about long, flat pieces of metal with a handle at either side. So rapper dancing is, essentially, sword dancing. As in dancing. With swords. Swords in name only, really, as they're blunt and useless at cutting anything, but still the sorts of things your hands would rather not get trapped between.

You have immense respect for rapper dancers. You've seen at least four sides 'do rapper', and they've never left you less than open-mouthed in astonishment. The rapper swords themselves were, as you've been told many times, originally used by miners. They were flat enough and blunt enough to be able to be scraped along the backs of pit ponies, to wipe away the sweat.

Quite who the idiot genius was that thought of dancing with the swords is not recorded. But a rapper dance, in summary, is this: find four other people. Give each one of them, and yourself, a rapper sword. Those swords can turn about themselves. Get each person to grip hold of the end of the next sword in the circle. Weave in and out, under and over each other, in a topologist's nightmare, and never let go. Like one of those magic puzzles that Rubik used to sell, come together every now and then in a circle, and lock swords. If you've done it right, the swords form a perfect five-pointed star. Show the star. Expect the audience to applaud. (It's better seen than described.)

Well, that's the theory anyway. The practice, for a cack-handed dancer like you, is rather different.

The side are kind enough to take everything at half speed. It's your first time, after all. And yet you still turn anticlockwise rather than clockwise, you forget your position in the line, you turn left rather than right. And if you get things wrong, the stakes are high.

"No, turn out of the circle. Out of the circle. You're turning in. OUT! THE OTHER WAY! OUT!"
"But I... oh. Ow. OW! ****! ****! THAT HURT!"
"Well, yes..."

You carry on, chafed and chastened. You do get it right the second time. Just about.

Nursing your wounds, you console yourself that at least you weren't the person who had five swords interlocked around his chest and neck at one point during the dance. Given everything else that went on, you're quite surprised that he trusted you to hold one of them in exactly the right place at the right time. At this point, you remember reading how rapper's gained a new lease of life with young dancers - more so than morris. By now, you can see why. Dancing with hankies isn't quite as high-octane.

The side decide to give you a rest, and return to what you know best - or at least, what you're not quite so clueless at doing. It's a traditional stick dance.

The time was when you'd have been mildly alarmed, seeing all those sticks being hit about the place. Now it seems like a relief. You never thought you'd call folk dancing 'extreme'. But rapper is the closest you've got so far, as the back of your hand will tell you.

But what do you know? Things seem to fall into place. Yes, you collide with your partner at least once - and worse, immediately apologise, breaking a cardinal rule of public morris dancing. Yes, your hat bounces alarmingly on your head as you dance - you really need to paint up that new one. Yes, you find yourself turning in the wrong direction at the wrong point. But in spite of all that, you're pleased. You manage not to disgrace yourself. You manage to turn in all the right places to avoid getting bashed on the head with a stick. Once or twice, you even manage to smile, and mean it. Your accent was still terrible, though.

Pose for photos, hand over the cheque, get a lift home, and a debrief. Your dancing is coming on well, you're told. And for the first time since you started morris dancing, you're beginning to believe it too.

And as you're in danger of getting too big for your morris shoes, it's probably time for you to realise just how far you've got to go. You thought morris dancing was difficult (and truth be told, you still do). But round the corner, lies something even more tricky...

- So this, er, stuff, it does wash off, er, easily doesn't it?
- Oh yes. Not like last year. It's water based. Could you close your eyes? I'm going to miss them otherwise.
- Last year? What...
- Not planning on doing anything important tomorrow, are you?

If you're still looking like this, then no, you're not. You're only five days on from being the Mumbles horse, and now you're outside a pub wearing a sack-cloth and smudged black face-paint. Inside, in a minute or so, you really are going to be Slasher Jack, and you are terrified.

A century and more ago, mummers would descend on somewhere unannounced, then perform, collect and leave. A rough theatrical smash-and-grab raid, really. If you didn't like them being there, you had to deal with it. You get on with painting the face of one of the other morrissers, and ponder quite how this translates to the 21st century. Here and now, the prospect of interrupting what looks like quite an important televised football match scares you.

From inside the bar door, you hear the landlord muffling an introduction. The narrator bursts in. Saint George is killed. The doctor revives him. Then, five seconds, one line and one brandish of a wooden sword later, your turn is over. The narrator is called something vaguely unprintable by one of the more effervescent locals: it seems that's the payback for talking over the UEFA Cup fourth round on ITV2. You all sing, and the play ends. After the charity collection, the side decides to take themselves somewhere else.

Thankfully, the clientele at the other two pubs give you a far warmer reception, particularly when you help out with their pub quiz in between. The rest of the side perform a dance that involves some astoundingly suggestive stick-clashing, and you watch agog, realising that everything is too far gone for you ever to be able to disown them. It goes down nearly as well as a rendition of The Wild Rover, which also means it's time to leave.

You arrive home, and your wife tells you she can't really take you seriously if you look like that and you have looked in the mirror, haven't you? Not properly, you haven't - not until now. You're relieved that the paint really does wash off with soap and warm water. It has been a bit trickier than that in the past, if you believe what you've been told.

You can sing, but don't expect to go under the Horse. "Nobody does that but me," says [the horse skull's owner]. "It's 134 years old now - and if anybody breaks it, it's going to be me."

For some reason, your wife finds this highly amusing.

You've been given the part of Slasher Jack, a largely dispensable role containing the challenging sum of one line. To wit:

SLASHER JACK enters.

SLASHER JACK exits.

You don't think this will be a problem. It's a part not even you could forget. You might not have a pistol, but you have a prop wooden sword. You have the promise of a sack-cloth as some sort of costume. All told, you think you'll enjoy this.

Slightly unusually, your mummers' play will be sharing the bill with a horse. To be precise, a dead horse. There's a peculiarly Welsh tradition, common around the turning of the year, that involves putting a horse's skull on a stick, wrapping a skirt of material around it, and putting the whole thing on a pole. Called Y Fari Lwyd (the Grey Mare), it was paraded from house to house around Christmas, to the delight of local youths and the despair of pretty much everyone else.

The Mumbles horse isn't exactly a Mari Lwyd - but it's close enough. And five minutes before you're due to start your play, the skull and skirt are wheeled out by its keeper.

Then there's silence. Something's wrong.

"Where's your son?" asks the head of your side.
"He can't make it," says the dead horse's keeper. "He tried really hard, and he's really sorry, but there's no way he could get the time off work."
"Oh. That's a shame."
"I know. But if one of you lot wants to wear it..."

And then, inevitably, every eye starts looking at you.

Slasher Jack is obviously more dispensable than even you thought. So today, Matthew, you're going to be the remains of a 140-year-old horse. Clambering under the ribbons and material, you clumsily put on your new head. It's heavy and cumbersome. It's been attached to what could be the pole from a rotary clothes line. You spend two minutes trying to get everything in the right place, without the pole showing or the head falling off. You fail. And now you're due to perform.

As dead horses go, you're not the most convincing. You stand on the sidelines while the others perform the mummers' play. Saint George is killed and revived, the dark knight seen off, and you peer at the world from between the folds of a yellowing sheet. You turn Sharper's head to look at the action.

Sharper - yes, he has a name, or at least he did in the 1860s, when the rest of the horse belonged to a mobile grocer from the Gower. Sharper died, but he was buried in a lime kiln. The local boys, Victorian Arthur Daleys all no doubt, heard about the Fari Lwyd tradition, took Sharper's head, decorated it, and took it from house to house asking for money. The local vicar helped them get a song to sing, so you suspect they can't have been that bad.

140 years later, they're singing the song again, and you bow down in the right bits so that Sharper can be seen to die. You're getting the hang of this now.

It's time to meet and greet, so one of the other mummers takes you by the mane and drags you around the market. The timing's perfect, because you've discovered a rope which, excellently, pulls apart Sharper's jaws when you tug it. You spend the next five minutes perfecting the timing, and seeing just how far you can make unsuspecting members of the public jump into the air when they see a dead horse's jaws spring open. You admit that this probably makes you quite a bad person.

All too soon the market winds down. The carols are sung. Still under the skull, you pose for photos with a variety of small children, safe in the knowledge that their resulting phobias will keep any psychiatrists in clover for decades to come.

And then you go walkabout, dodging the Mumbles' bus shelters, pedestrian crossings and Christmas shoppers. The local pub has asked the mummers to do their play there. So you go with them, still half-man, half-horse, leading yourself to water, or something a little more potent.