Colin Tedford

On June 5, after Jake had come home, Juggler Meadow and the Putney Morris Men came to dance for him. He was still in “pretty bad” physical shape – able to go outside, but not to retain his own memory of the event. “It was definitely a low point in my life, so for me it’s very special to think that these guys all came over and breather a kind of life in me that was different from … CPR.”

Jake’s friend Geoff Rogers dragged him to his first morris practice in the early 1980s. Jake says, “It’s an easy community to like – really nice people, and the dancing is really fun, and building a sense of community.

“The big tradition is dancing in the dawn on May Day. We would go to Juggler Meadow and camp out, and start dancing while it was still dark – and for me that’s where I felt something extraordinary. It was just the sense that I was doing something with other people that other people had been doing for a long time, and I felt like it was really important.

“I’m not a big believer in things that can’t be explained; I really like science … but I definitely had the sense that there was something I couldn’t explain, that it was special and that it was important. It could be as simple as the relationships between people, which I think is really, really important.”