Category: Dancing

Shopping – 23 June 2025

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Today we were going shopping.

It was a day of hit and miss showers. Also, it was much cooler than it has been of late which was great for sleeping in. Those hot muggy days of last week were not the best for trying to get some rest.

Instead of doing the usual Tesco run we went to Waitrose in Stirling for a change. Wow, did we have a big shop today! I was beginning to think the boot wouldn’t be big enough and we’d need to buy a trailer. It’s not often we’re tempted by the variety of goods on sale there, but we were today. I’m sure I heard the wee Blue car groan when we shut the boot.

We had just unpacked when there was a knock at the door and there was a delivery man with what obviously was a box of flowers addressed to Scamp. The card inside was from Alex and Carol. We found out later it was because I’d been saying that Scamp seemed a bit down lately and Alex must have picked up on that. Such a kind thing to do. Thank you Alex and Carol.

After lunch I wanted to go out and get some photos and left Scamp reading at home. I got a few shots, most of which were of insects or wildflowers. Insects always seem to have their own agenda and either stay put for a while, or are off ‘doing things’ immediately you point a camera at them. I must have found the lazy ones today. One was a strange looking red eyed fly and the other was a little pure black insect that I’d have called a ‘Buzzer’ if I was fishing. Both flies were hiding under leaves or sitting on leaves. Either way they were sheltering form those hit and miss showers I was talking about. Of the two, I chose the Black ‘Buzzer’ as PoD.

As usual I’d been carried away with photographing insects and plants and forgot the time. Scamp was going to a dance display arranged by one of the Witches. By the time I got back she was almost ready for Jeanette Witch to pick her up.

I’d had mince for dinner yesterday and today I was converting it into Spag Bol. Not a difficult task and I soon had the feeling that the plate I was using wasn’t really going to be big enough, so I ate as much as I wanted from an excellent Spaghetti Bolognese then put the remainder, regretfully, in the bin. Dessert was the last squat peach. Just as lovely as the first one had been, two or three days ago.

Scamp staggered in just before 11pm and raved for a while about the dancing those girls and one boy could do. I’m glad she enjoyed it, but I’m not so sure I would like it.

Tomorrow I may be going to get a new pair of trainers. The ones I got from Go Outdoors are ok, just ok. I’m sure there are better ones out there.

Another damp, dismal, day – 9 June 2025

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More or less what we expected after reading the weather report and checking online. It’s a Monday. Mondays are often dull. We had to cancel the visit to the Kelpies. I don’t think they’d be coming out anyway today.

With a lot of help from Scamp, I parcelled up my unwanted, too narrow and too short, dance sneakers, then drove over to UPS and gave the box and the proof of posting to the lady there and she said everything was in order. It’s up to UPS and Amazon now to do the rest of the business.

Next was a trip to Tesco for the usual lunch requirements. I did think about going for a walk in St Mo’s, but the constant showers didn’t encourage me to go walking in the rain. Instead I read a few more pages in my latest book, Murder Mindfully. It’s described as a the darkly comic bestselling thriller. I don’t know about the best seller, but it’s certainly very dark and at times funny. About a third through it now and I’m still not sure what’s going on or where it’s going!

I took some photos of the next batch of partly dried flowers that landed on the mat a couple of days ago. Then it was time to get ready to go to Kirsty’s class. Tonight we were reprising Waltz Nioli. I’d forgotten just how much I had forgotten. This was the dance class wearing my new dance sneakers and I must say they were very comfortable. I’d been told by a lot of folk that they make you think you have nothing on your feet and now I see exactly what they mean. Lovely, light trainers.

Drove home through more rain and around 7pm we had our dinner which was Giovanni Rana Tortelloni pasta and yesterday’s refried baby potatoes. Very nice and filling too.

After dinner I took some more photos of the flowers, but it was one of the earlier ones that got PoD.

Tomorrow we may have another chance to see the big horses, if they’re not too rusty.

Another fairly early rise for us dancers – 7 June 2025

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Up and out by 9.45am to join the M80 then the M8 and trundle along through torrential rain to Brookfield and a fairly large dance class. The last one for a fortnight.

First dance was the Charnwood cha-cha. Actually a routine we are fairly au fait with. A gentle cha-cha that doesn’t stress you too much and works quite well. Next was a short Foxtrot which again didn’t put us under too much pressure, mainly because we’d done most of it before.

A break for a sequence dance was next, Scamp’s favourite, the Tina Tango, the Ed Sheeran version. We’ve danced it so many times, I sometimes think I can get through the routine blindfolded – but I can’t! After that it was Rona’s Rumba. It’s not my favourite rumba routine, but Jane wrote it for a friend of hers who died recently after a short illness and it’s just a case of learning it for her and Rona’s sake.

We just had to slide in a House of Bamboo for all the line dancers in the class. At least it’s one of the dances where people smile as they dance it, not at all like Waltz Across Texas, a terrible dirge of a dance.

We finished up with the Mayfair Quickstep which isn’t a real quickstep, but gets you moving round the floor at quite a pace.

We said goodbye to everyone and drove home again to even more heavy rain. This was probably the last dance class for a couple of weeks … thankfully. Having said that, I did actually enjoy the class and clarified some of the routines with help from Jane.

Easy run home and just when I thought I’d go out for a walk, the rain returned with a vengeance. It was that sort of day. I did remember to wish Jamie and Simonne a good day with their Open Gardens day. The house and gardens did look grand in the photos he sent. Well done you pair!!

PoD was taken in the garden and is another Schoolgirl photos, but taken in the back garden this time, after the last rain shower.

Today’s dinner was a take on Chicken & Pea tray bake. This time it was a spiced up version with skin on, bone in chicken thighs with potato wedges and red onions. This was our first attempt at it, but we agreed it needed some refinement.

No real plans for tomorrow. It all depends on the weather.

The last day of May – 31 May 2025

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How quickly May disappeared!

Usually I’m sketching and painting in May for EDIM (Every Day In May), but this year was too complicated with many things going on. Too many things, so I decided to forego EDIM for a year and de-stress a bit. I think it worked. Looking forward now to June and hoping to get good weather like we did in May.

We were up early today, 8.30am is early for us! We were heading to Brookfield at the new time of 9.45am for the rest of the summer. It was allegedly to give us more time in the afternoon for something that wasn’t dancing. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea.
Also, it was a small class, only 3 couples including us and I wasn’t sure if that was a good idea too. However it did give the teachers a great opportunity to teach almost ‘one-to-one’ and that seemed to work. It also meant the teachers had their eagle eyes on us and, as I sometimes say, no room to hide.

We survived the first dance which was an old favourite, the Charnwood Cha Cha. Lots of little bits and pieces we’d forgotten. Hadn’t realised how long ago we learned this dance.

The next lesson was Rona’s Rumba. We’d learned it in Perth a couple of weeks ago, but today we began to put things in their correct place and it started to make more sense, but it’s still a bit complicated than our usual rumba.

Just to break things up and because there was nowhere to hide, the next track was House of Bamboo. I’ve never danced it apart from an aborted try about a month ago. I tried it again and although I did fill in some of the spaces I’d created in my last attempt, but I’m still not sold on it.

A chance to dance the new quickstep took us into the details of dancing a Fish Tail. The little details make this dance worth trying again and again. By the end of it, I was more secure in my dancing of this shape I’ve tried sometimes successfully and often unsuccessfully. It needs work.
A couple of sequence dances finished a strange morning at Brookfield.

Drove home half intending to go the M74/M73 route, but then decided Kingston Bridge would be more sensible. In the end, Kingston won, and it was the right answer.

The rest of the day can be summed up in two words “It Rained”. We had been warned by the weather fairies that there might be Thundery Rain. Although we didn’t see or hear any actual thunder, we did hear the rain and it was heavy.

In one of the dry spells I took the chance to shoot a couple of flowers. A bloom from Gertrude Jekyll got PoD, with my Peony Karl Rosenfield a close second. I had one flower from it last year, but this year I have at least five flower heads. A beautiful flower and one of my mum’s favourites. I hope she likes it.

No plans for tomorrow, but the weather doesn’t look promising.

Driving home – 18 May 2025

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After an hour’s dancing.

Woke about 5am to the joyous sound of hundreds of screaming seagulls. Well, it felt like hundreds, but it could have been thousands. Really, why do we call them seagulls. Most of them have never been near the sea!

Went down early for breakfast and were some of the first folk in the restaurant. At least we didn’t have to queue for the breakfast. After that we went for a walk down to the viewing gallery over the River Tay and at the early (for us) hour of 10am, it was pleasantly comfortable to walk around without a jacket or a hoodie.

We took a circuitous route round the town that led back to the Salutation, thinking we might be the first there, but we were wrong, there were lots of other dancers there tying on shoes and discussing yesterday’s high points.

We danced a mixture of old and new dances, mostly sequence dances with the occasional ballroom or jive dance thrown in. An hour and a half later we trundled out of the hotel and drove out of Perth. We’d already dropped our bags, rucksacks and other stuff in the car.

A relatively quiet drive home with a stop at M&S in Dunblane for tonight’s dinner which was a roast in the bag chicken. I’d already bagged a few frames in Perth as a backup just in case.

Dinner was great. Nicely roasted chicken which was moist and tasted great. Served with a side salad and the last of the new potatoes.

Watched the Emilia Romagna GP and gave a small cheer for the driver who came second, only because he was British.

PoD was a shot of a padlock on the railing of “The Ship” viewing gallery of the River Tay. A kind of abstract.

Tomorrow may be tidying up day.

More problems – 10 May 2025

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Another hot day.  Today we reached over 20ºc although there was a lot of cloud too.

Last night I had a big problem with the iMac. I was attempting to work through my usual procedure of writing the blog on an app. After the blog is written I usually select all the text and then open my app for posting the blog and drop the text into a window that opens. Yesterday the app wouldn’t open. It just gave me a message “403 Forbidden”.

No matter what I did, I got the same message. Finally I went online and read some gobbledegook instructions that I couldn’t understand. I did think of trying some of them, then came across the fix. All the person wrote was “Just leave it. It will sort itself out.” By now it was 11pm and I was tired and panicking just a bit, so I did what the writer suggested. Shut the computer down and went to bed. I slept better than I’d thought I would, and in the morning I switched the iMac on and everything was running normally. I don’t know who you are, but thank you for that helpful suggestion.

Later in the morning we drove over to Brookfield for our regular Saturday morning dance class.  It started with a Line Dance called House of Bamboo. Now I hate line dances, and I’ll add this one to that list. Next was a Melody Foxtrot. A much gentler and better written sequence dance.

Next we were straight into a new Quickstep. I stumbled through it and eventually made some sense of it. Again, not my favourite, but much better than the line dance. I don’t think it’s as good as the other quicksteps Jane has devised.

We did a Sweetheart Rumba which took two tracks before everyone was singing from the same hymn sheet. Then it just fell into place.

Drove home over the Kingston Bridge almost without stopping. It was just one of those days when the traffic ran perfectly.

I walked down to the shops later to get the makings of tonight’s dinner, but the shelves were very bare and I phoned Scamp to ask if a cook-at-hope curry would suffice and she agreed it would. Late on a Saturday afternoon is not the time for food shopping.

We sat in the back garden for an hour or so tonight with a G&T each. As I’m writing this, Scamp is watering the garden. Only fair, I did it on Thursday.

PoD was a photo of a Rhododendron called Nancy Evans, taken in the garden.

No plans for tomorrow

A Day in the Toon – 5 May 2025

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Not off the leash this time, but joining Scamp on a shopping spree.

Well, a shopping spree and a bit of window shopping too. Scamp wanted to look at interesting things, like Freezers (Brrr) and Fridges ( Just Cool). Me? I went looking for bottles of descaler for my coffee maker. I know it’s just about due a decoke, I just don’t know when, exactly, but it’s best to be ready for it when it occurs. I did have a look at a new coffee maker like Jamie’s, but the prices were just a little over the top.

I’d forgotten to take my sunglasses out of the car and was half way down Bucky Street when I realised. I thought I’d be able to buy a pair of clip-on shades now that I need a pair of distance glasses and also a pair of readers. A clip-on pair can be hot swapped across both pairs of specs although it’s a bit of a faff. Also I can flip up the clip-ons and give myself Mickey Mouse ears. Scamp always laughs at that. I’d have liked a pair of clip-ons, but nobody in the vicinity of Buchanan Galleries wanted to sell me a pair. Maybe they’ve gone out of fashion these days.

I got a couple of photos while I was wandering aimlessly down and around Buchanan Street. My favourite was a couple sitting eating ice lollies on the steps of the Galleries. That became PoD.

We drove home via Tiso where I was hoping to find a pair of trainers. Maybe found one pair of Scarpa trainers, but I was getting tired by that time and just wanted to get home. Maybe go back again toward the end of the week.

Spoke to Hazy for a while after we got home and heard about folk who can’t take a hint about over staying their welcome, even if they are distant relatives (not our side of the family, by the way) and that poor Tilly needs an expensive x-ray of her back legs.

Just had time to drive down to The Link to attend Kirsty’s dance class. Tonight was a full class. Six or seven couples gyrating in a Tango. We had missed last week, but enjoyed the class tonight. Some bits of it need cleaned up, but the general shape of the dance is ok. A much more compact routine than Stewart & Jane’s, but still with all the technical terms.

Tomorrow, Scamp is supposed to meet Isobel for coffee in the morning. I might go too.

Remembering Dancin’ – 3 May 2025

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Today for the first time in ages, probably more than a month, we drove to Brookfield for a dance class.

Quite a big class. At least half a dozen couples ready to strut their stuff … and us, almost ready. Willing too, in as much as, willing the big hand to go round the clock one and a half times and set us free … or maybe that was just me. Ok, enough with the ellipses, lets get started.

We started with Scamp’s absolute favourite, the Tina Tango danced to Shivers by Ed Sheeran. That was us hooked. From there we went into a Foxtrot, not just any foxtrot, the Gershwin Foxtrot. The one we both liked. Much better that those chopped up foxtrots Jane invents in an attempt to make things ‘easier’. This was the full strength one with the “Continuous Hover Cross”. Don’t let anyone convince you that it’s a ‘lot less bovver with a Hover’. It isn’t, at least not with this one. However, after two lessons from Jane and one set of instructions from Stewart the whole thing was becoming possible. Not every time, but at least half the time. It’s a really elegant dance and one both of us like.

Next up was a Blue Angel which we first learned with Kirsty, in fact, one of the first things we learned from Kirsty. Now it’s just a wee easy dance, then it was very complicated.

Next was a Viennese Waltz. You know the one it’s just continuous spinning, first one way, then the other with a bit of straightening out to prevent the participants throwing up or spinning into a wall. What one of the dancers a long time ago called “A Burly Roon”!

We finished with a Mayfair Quickstep danced to “500 Miles” by The Proclaimers, which was appropriate because it felt like we’d danced 500 miles today!

Drove home and risked the lengthy roadworks at the Barrs factory, but we didn’t have to wait too long to get through, then we found a parking space outside the house. How convenient.

Scamp wanted part of the old blackcurrant bush chopped down, so I took a saw to it and cut out a fair chunk of the diseased bush. Hopefully that will open the bush to the air and possible encourage new growth. Later in the afternoon I planted three potatoes in the fancy two part pot. I’m intending to plant the remainder tomorrow or maybe Monday.

PoD went to a lovely pink Aquilegia flower I photographed, growing beside the path when I was going over to Condorrat to get dinner which was a Special Fish Supper with two Pickled Onions (one each).

No plans for tomorrow, but temperatures are set to fall. There is even a chance of snow in the north. Brrr!

Dancin’ – 5 April 2025

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Dance class was in full swing this morning in Brookfield.

Lots of folk desperate to get their fix of dancing, all eager to learn, even including me. There would be no dance class for at least two weeks because the teachers were off on holiday ( or as they described it, “teaching on a cruise” ). So a holiday by another name.

A gentle intro to start with. A couple of easy sequence dances before we charged into today’s topic: Tango and all that it entailed. Bent knees, staccato movements, spin turns, half turns, reverse turns. My head was spinning and we were only halfway through the routine.

A break for a lecture then on again, this time the target was a quickstep nobody really remembered from before Covid. Isn’t it strange that so much is now described as pre-Covid and past-Covid, but nobody wants to discuss the years that were stolen by Covid itself. This dance, though was done during Covid and we were just learners then and hadn’t reached the heady heights of Quickstep. We learned a lot of it today. Even they mysterious ‘Fishtails’ that used to baffle me, but which are quite familiar territory now. Most of it I enjoyed.

We finished with another couple of sequence tracks before being sent on our way back home.

It was a beautiful day. At least, to look at, it was a beautiful day, but it was the cold wind that stole away the warmth of the sun. When we got home it was great to sit and soak up the heat coming through the windows, knowing it was really cold outside. The weather fairies say it’s going to get warmer during the coming week. I certainly hope so.

We decided to have dinner from the chip shop. Scamp settled for a Black Pudding Supper and I had the first Chicken Breast Supper I’ve had for years and years. Both were very filling but Scamp said her’s was a bit spicy.

We watched an old BBC programme about who wrote what songs back from the ‘70s until the present day or at least into the 2020s. It was a bit tedious after a while, but there was nothing else worth watching on a Saturday night. To be honest, there never is at the weekend.

PoD went to some flowering cherries or Gean as they are known in Scotland.

Tomorrow, hopefully we’ll go out for a run somewhere. Prezzies are needed for some folk.

 

Dancin’ – 3 April 2025

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Or as my brother said “Enjoy the Jiggin’”

We drove over to Glenburn wondering if there would be big holdups on the way after a warning message on BBC about a car on fire on the M8 near Charing Cross. However we needn’t have worried because the traffic was fairly light all the way there.

The ballroom was quite quiet when we arrived, but then people started to arrive. Maybe it was our presence that gave them the courage to come. Along the lines of “Well, if they’re coming, we won’t be the worst dancers on the floor!”

We started with a waltz. Actually we started in the living room with a waltz before we set off. Just the basics of Kirsty’s waltz to make sure we knew all the moves and had most of them in the right places. The actual waltz went well and we managed a couple of tracks. Then it was the usual story of a Latin dance followed by a Sequence dance followed by another Ballroom dance. We danced a fair bit, but also spent a good bit of time just talking to folk we hadn’t met for more than a month.

We left, as usual, just after 3pm to avoid the school rush. It was the next part of the return journey where I made my mistake. I decided that as the last couple of times we’d chanced the Kingston Bridge and the traffic was light both times. It was worth another chance today. Not so. We were only just in the line when it was red tail lights everywhere and everyone ground to a halt with easily a mile and a half of stop-go traffic for the rest of the journey up over the bridge. I won’t make that mistake again … until the next time!

Went for a walk down to the shops to get fruit and nuts because we had no tangerines left in the fruit bowl. It was a cold wind that was blowing all the way to the shops. You forget how chilly it can be in April, especially with a wind blowing.

Scamp was making dinner tonight and it was a Spiced Coconut Chicken Traybake. Really quite spicy, but certainly worth another try, although it required a fair amount of preparation. The rhubarb tart and apple tart that followed it was a delight!!!

No plans for tomorrow but I’m hoping some coffee will be delivered.