Drove to Brookfield and a hundred people we there for dancing class.
Not really a hundred, but lots more than normal. I don’t know why that might be. Maybe it’s because the S&J fan club are going to somewhere in Spain soon and some folk needed a couple of refresher courses and had a Saturday morning free. Or maybe it was our scintillating dancing skills that were drawing them in, but I don’t think so. Still, it was a big class.
The first dance was the October Waltz. I don’t know who invented it, but I firmly believe they had their head up their backside when they made it up. It just doesn’t flow as a waltz should. I find it clumsy and badly written. Too many forward and back moves. If you danced it as just one couple and not a sequence dance, you’d be crashing into the dancers behind you and causing mayhem. I put up with it for the requisite amount of time and hoped that whatever was coming next would be better.
The next dance was a Jive and it was marginally better. I could understand the steps and the order they were being danced in. That’s when a Black Monkey waltzed (pun intended) onto the floor. After that I couldn’t put a foot right. Everything was being analysed by Scamp and found wanting. “Lift your knee when you do the Hip Bump” I’d just done that, but apparently it was a different knee I should have been using. After we’d attempted all the different steps and worked out the sequence they should be danced in, I still wasn’t getting it right. Jive is a routing, like Salsa, but without the joy that salsa has.
The last unit was a Rumba. A very short one. We had learned a longer version a few years ago and I felt this new one wasn’t anywhere as good nor as elegant as that old dance.
We finished with Scamp’s favourite sequence dance, the Tina Tango danced to Ed Sheehan’s Shivers. Scamp’s best favourite dance, and mine now too. It’s just joyful, especially compared to today lesson.
I was speaking to a fellow dancer when we were leaving and asked him if he’d enjoyed the morning class. He replied that he’d rather have *“paid the twenty quid to watch Partick Thistle being beaten again.” That more or less summed up my feelings.
We drove home through heavy traffic which turned out to be Celtic supporters travelling to their home game against Dundee United. Apparently none of the supporters wanted a black monkey which still clung to me.
By the time we got home my replies to Scamp were becoming monosyllabic and it wasn’t until I decide to go out in the rain to get tonight’s dinner that the black monkey left me. I don’t know where it went, I was just happy that it was gone from me and despite the weather, I felt so much better.
PoD was a couple of Pansies that have survived the winter so far and seem happy in their spot on the garden fence.
My apologies to you S. I know you were just trying to help and you did help. I was the one at fault.
Tomorrow we should go out for a stroll, if the weather is playing nice.