Category: Dancing

A day at the horses – 31 August 2023

Posted on by Zogman

Not the galloping kind, but really big horses.

It was a really beautiful morning with blue skies and fluffy white clouds. I kid you not, we do occasionally have good days up beyond Hadrian’s Wall. We discussed where we might go to enjoy this sudden change in the weather after yesterday’s sudden showers. Scamp’s first suggestion of Drumpellier didn’t really excite me and my first suggestion of the Kelpies was always going to be a winner with Scamp. So, we went off to see the big horses. We were so busy talking while I was driving, we missed the slip-road for Falkirk and were heading for Stirling. It didn’t matter, I knew we could turn off just outside Stirling and head along the M9 to Grangemouth and from there it was an easy road to Helix park where the horses live.

We paid for the luxury of parking near to the Kelpies, the giant horses we’d come to see. I’d been there just over a week before, but I didn’t mind going again. There is always something to photograph in the park. Today it was one of the canal boats that grabbed my attention, but the big horses got PoD. We had lunch outside the cafe because it seemed such a waste to sit in a hot cafe when we could enjoy the fresh air outside and look over the park. Just for fun, after our lunch we shared an ice cream boat. It’s a wee boat shaped dish made from thin plastic with two squirts of Mr Whippy ice cream, and a ’99’ with two spoons to share. Just for fun, like I said, but it felt so relaxing sitting in the sun having lunch. Sort of ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’. The Monet version, not the shocking nakedness of the Manet one!

Another walk round the horses to say goodbye and we walked over the canal and along the towpath to the carpark. I suggested we might go and visit Klondyke Garden Centre on our way home. It was a bit out of our way, but it would be a change from our usual plant specialists. Scamp was in her element. So much so, she couldn’t quite decide what she was going to bring home. In the end we bought a Chrysanthemum ball, a variegated Berberis, a Basil plant and a small ornamental grass. She also found a fruit stall in the centre and bought lots of interesting veg and fruit. An expensive visit, but very worthwhile. I think we may go back!

On the way home, I stopped at Tesco, terminated my connection to EE and joined Tesco Mobile. Not as good coverage as EE, but cheaper with more data allowance and the promise not to increase the price over 24 months. Just waiting now for my PAC code to complete its change over to Tesco. I’ve been meaning to do it for ages, and it was all completed in about ten minutes.

If you care to take a look at what was happening this day in 2022 and then go back a day (it’s easy), you might believe in synchronicity!  Carl Jung was a clever man!!

Tomorrow I think Scamp is intending to go to FitSteps and I’m going to do as little as possible!

 

Not going far – 29 August 2023

Posted on by Zogman

I had enough exercise yesterday. I didn’t want any more today.

Scamp was out early to get her nails ‘done’ again, then she was meeting Shona for coffee. I was asked if I wanted to join them, but I decided they would get on better without me!

Instead I stayed home and read for a while and looked through the photos that had arrived in Flickr overnight. The window cleaner arrived and I spent a wee while blethering to him. Basically, I did nothing, or as close to nothing as I felt I could get away with.

After Scamp arrived home with her new lilac nails we had lunch and then I went for a walk in St Mo’s. It was one of those days with gusty winds blowing the rain clouds around, creating what the weather fairies delight in calling ‘scattered showers’. PoD went to a rather demonic looking photo of what looks like a pair of horns behind a bush. It’s actually a macro of an earwig’s rear end! There are over 1000 species of earwigs in the world and only 4 are native to the UK.

The competitor for PoD was a shot of a Peacock butterfly with its wings locked together to keep a sudden rain shower out of their delicate upper surface. As soon as the rain stopped the wings folded out and it sat there taking in the warmth from the sun that had appeared after the cloud cleared.

Dinner tonight was an experiment. Pasta Carbonara with mushrooms, shallots and finely sliced bacon. It seemed to go down well and will be worth trying another time.

A short dance practise in the evening  just to make sure the Joy’s Waltz and the new short(ish) cha-cha are firmly in my head.

Tomorrow is an early rise. Scamp and the rest of the witches are off to Pitlochry on the bus for the day. I’m driving them to the Town Centre to catch the bus which leaves at 8.45am! I hope they have a great day. No singing on the bus, though!

Dancin’ Saturday – 26 August 2023

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Driving through the roadworks. Roadworks that will last until the end of September!

We drove over to Brookfield for a reasonably successful dance class, and ignoring the roadworks, it was a pleasant enough drive. Two new members, two girls. One just likes to dance and the other one wore a Fit Steps tee shirt and thought she could do it all. Oh dear, wrong thing to say.

While Jane and Stewart took them aside and explained what we were doing in class, we practised our Joy’s Waltz. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a great improvement on last week. We did actually manage once through the entire routine without a mistake, well, almost without a mistake. Then it went to pieces again as it often, but not always, does! I am improving and when I get things like the Outside Spin right, I can feel that I’m getting it right.

A couple of easy sequence dances to ease the new starts in to this strange old fashioned way of dancing, where everyone does the same moves at the same time. After that we hurtled in to the new Cha-Cha with the terrifying Cross Basic. I don’t know if it is really basic, but it certainly has the ability to make us both cross. For once, Stewart agreed with me about who was moving clockwise and who wasn’t. I’m glad someone agrees with me sometimes. By the end of that part of the lesson, things were making much more sense.

Another sequence dance and then a chance to practise the Quickstep. If there is a great stumbling block in our dances it’s the Quickstep. It really is well named. The steps come at you so quickly it’s almost impossible sometimes to stop and find out where you are in the routine.

All things considered, it was a worthwhile class where we learned a few things and got a chance to practise lots more things in a big dance hall.

We took the M8 – M74 – M73 – M80 route home and stopped at Tesco on the way to pick up lunch. We’d already decided tonight’s dinner was coming from Golden Bowl.

Rain showers all afternoon, but I braved them to take a walk in St Mo’s where PoD was a ladybird hiding under a knapweed flower.

Watched the qualifying for the Dutch GP. Interesting but not as enthralling as the World Athletics Championships, especially the pole vault where the Swedish vaulter Mondo Duplantis cleared an incredible 6.1m.

Tomorrow Scamp is heading to Glasgow for a perfume making class. Thankfully I wasn’t invited!

Waltzing around – 24 August 2023

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This morning we had a quick practise of the waltz. I needed it.

We spent so long yesterday arguing about whether we were going clockwise or anti-clockwise when we were doing the Cross Basic, I forgot all the stuff I’d learned about the Outside Spin. So this morning we concentrated on the Outside Spin. After a couple of mistakes I got back to the basics of it, and this next section is for my benefit. It will make no sense to anyone reading it, except me and perhaps Scamp:

After the Drag Hesitation, and the backward steps turn right and plant my right foot, then spin clockwise on it around Scamp. After that it’s a Back Lock and we’re nearly finished.

I think that’s it. It seemed to work yesterday and this morning.

That was this morning. This afternoon we drove to Glenburn to a very small group of dancers. First dance of course was a waltz. That’s when I realised I’d left the Outside Spin in the house, I must have, because I certainly didn’t have it with me! I just couldn’t remember how to get my feet to complete that simple couple of sentences in italics I’ve just written. It just wouldn’t come. Disaster! Thank goodness for sequence dances Stewart interleaves between the ballroom and latin dances. They repeat and repeat short ‘sequences’ of moves. That’s where they get their name from and also why they are so popular. After you’ve danced them for a while, they become embedded in muscle memory. I haven’t repeated the Outside Spin enough times yet to embed it.

After the halfway point of the tea dance, after the actual tea and coffee had been served and cleared away, the first dance of the second half is a waltz again and this time I stumbled through the waltz again, but this time it was a bit clearer and I remembered some of Stewart’s prompts and also Scamp’s hints. It was better, but not very elegant.

Barry and Cath, two long serving salsa dancers, and excellent tango dancers joined us after tea time for a blether. Also another dancer lady, Margaret McIver, sat and talked to us at tea time, but the two teachers sat in their little cliques and hardly spoke to us at all. That is not my idea of what teachers should do. They should encourage folk to join in the dance community and mingle. Maybe it’s just me, that I always find fault with teachers!

We left as usual just after 3pm to avoid the worst of the school transport, and we had a fairly easy run home.

I grabbed the opportunity of a few shots of our Japanese Anemone in flower in the garden and that became PoD.

Not the best dancing day, but maybe I’ve finally solved the problem of the Outside Spin and all it needs is practise now.

I think we both felt the temperature dropping a bit today. That seems to be the way the weather is going for next week according to the Weather Fairies.

No real plans for tomorrow, but we may go out to lunch.

Dancin’ – 10 August 2023

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We were off today to Glenburn to do some dancin’.

I’d been doing a bit of studying this morning. It was mainly centred on the latest iteration of Joy’s Waltz. We had a half hour or so of practise last night that went over the waltz and a bit of cha-cha. Today I knew that Scamp would want to put that practise to good use. Even after a bit of last minute revision, I wasn’t sure that practise would make perfect. Getting round the floor without doing too much damage and without crashing into anyone would be a win for me.

I don’t know what the Paisley council have been doing with their spending plans, but they must have found some extra money in a biscuit tin in a cupboard because that’s the only way they could manage finance the roadworks around Glenburn where we were going for dancing. I lost count of the number of diversion signs and roads being dug up as we drove out there. Worst of all, the road we usually drive home was closed off with a lorry and a few dozen traffic cones. How were we going to navigate round that? The only way I could think of was driving through Paisley itself and that’s a nightmare journey I didn’t want to make. The best thing to do was to put it behind us for now and enjoy the dancing.

The weather today was humid, very humid. I think we got up to 25ºc on the car thermometer and the temperature in the hall must have been similar. Again, we were lucky in whose table we sat at. Chatted away with David & Carol, John & Madge until we had enough folk to make the floor look busy. Waltz, of course, was first and for the first dance I was quite pleased that I managed to achieve my two goals. After that, it was two sequence dances followed with two ballroom or latin dances. We managed to navigate the sequence dances, but my skill level at ballroom and latin dances went gradually downhill. Even muscle memory wasn’t working towards the end. Plus, as Ella Fitzgerald sang, It was “Too Darn Hot!”

We drove away from Glenburn and decided to go back the way we always would and see what happened. Worst comes to the worst, we’d follow the diversion signs until we got lost and then rely on the sat nav. However as we were coming down the hill to the Hurlet roundabout where the road had been closed, it had magically been opened again and we simply drove home by our usual M77, M8, M74, M73 route.

Scamp decided that the sun was going to shine when we got back and took her folding chair out to soak up some of its rays. I took the A6500 out for a walk in St Mo’s and got a PoD of a lazy dragonfly sitting on the stones that provide grip on the boardwalk. Being cold blooded, I imagine they get a fair bit of heat from the stones which warm up in the sun. I extended my walk down to the shops and came home with some fruit and some flowers, because, well, it was Thursday. When I came back I joined Scamp in the garden with a can of Brewdog stout (Try it Jamie, it works) and a Pimms for Scamp.

Dinner tonight was sausage, egg, beans and chips which was a bit unusual, but worked quite well.

Tomorrow we’ve no real plans, but a change may be afoot. Heavy rain predicted to mark the end of the hot clammy weather.

Driving and dancing – 5 August 2023

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That’s all we seemed to do today.

Drove to Brookfield in the morning. It was a small group of only four couples, quite normal on a day with a dance in the evening. The floor in the room is still not quite right after a kids party with a bouncy castle inside about a month ago. My guess is that the bouncy castle scraped the floor and someone decide that polish or oil would repair the damage. It really won’t be properly fixed until footfall wears that skin off. So we had a shortened room again and also a shortened class time because the bowling club who use the hall were having an afternoon and needed time to set up. So a small class, a shortened floor space and fifteen minutes less time to dance.

We started with a sequence dance then went into the class proper with the new unnamed cha-cha routine which Scamp suggests should be the “Slippy Cha-Cha”! She should suggest it to the teachers. That was ok, but not wonderful, but much better than my attempt at Joy’s Waltz. Given that we hadn’t practised it since May, that wasn’t really surprising, and also, Jane did her usual and added in an extra feature, a Curved Feather. Were do they get these names from? Although they are much better than Michael’s dancing by numbers. At least Curved Feather give you a clue what shape you’re (supposed to be) making on the floor. I could hardly remember the start steps of the original waltz and had to rely on Scamp’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the dances. Even she was struggling with this one for a while. One more track of sequence and we handed the floor over to the eagerly waiting bowlers. They were like a well drilled army. Pulling out the tables and assembling them under the eagle eye of Mrs Sergeant Major who was in charge of the operation. We left them to it.

I made a bad decision on the way home and tried the route through the Clyde Tunnel, only to find, as many others did that there was NO THROUGH ROAD. Barriers and diversions everywhere. I eventually gave up and took the easy way out by driving back west along the M8 then the M77, took the first exit and joined the M77 again heading east this time. After that I just followed the car in front over the Kingston Bridge and home.

A roll ’n’ corned beef and another roll ’n’ fresh made bramble jam was lunch for us with Scamp substituting tomato for corned beef. While Scamp read, I took the A6500 out for a walk in St Mo’s and got PoD on the way home. It was a bunch of wild geranium flowers against the sky that caught my eye and my ultra-wide lens. Once the image had been dunked in Lightroom it looked quite the part!

Dinner was Chicken Milanese, then we sat and read for a short while before we got ready and headed off to the dance. Weather was the usual Scottish. Bright sunshine then immediately after that, torrential rain that changed back to sunshine again then the cycle repeated. I think the blue car now knows the way to Brookfield itself. Twice in one day is maybe too much, but there were extenuating circumstances today as there is no class next week because the hall will be being used for a village fete. Maybe the feet treading on the slippy floor will wear off the shine!

Sitting with Peter and Gillian, Naimat and Audrey and another couple whose names evade me as ours probably did to them. Good banter with Peter and Naimat, while Audrey, Gillian and Scamp did their best to add some decorum to the evening.
We danced all but one of the sequence dances and as many as we could, of the ballroom and latin dances. We really need to do more practise. We didn’t need to practise the salsa dances, they just came from muscle memory. We even got praise from Jane afterwards!

We stayed to the end and did a bit of cleaning up round our table then say our goodnights and drove home straight down the M8 to the M80 this time. No getting tangled up in Cycling World Championships that cause the earlier debacle. Even got parked right outside the house! A very good night.

Tomorrow we might go visit the cycling in Glasgow, but we’re hoping to get the train there. No road blocks on the railway we hope!

Blackpool Tower Ballroom – 29 July 2023

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We drove to Hamilton. Went on a bus. We danced. We went for a walk. We came home. It rained.

That’s the synopsis, here’s the detail:

The alarm woke us at 6.45am. After a quick breakfast and a cup of tea we drove to Strathclyde Park in Hamilton and parked as we’d been told, on the park road near the Holiday Inn. The bus arrived and we were driven down to Blackpool, listening to music played from a phone into a microphone. I hadn’t realised this was the ‘system’ that was being used until we were coming back. We are in the 21st century, aren’t we? The bus was a bit cold, but after a while the sun warmed it up. We shouldn’t complain, it was a comfortable enough journey.

We were dropped off at the Tower Ballroom and were shown to our seats in the ballroom itself. Lots of small round tables with seating arranged to let everyone have a view of the ballroom floor. Our Afternoon Tea was served on them. Posh little finger sandwiches on the bottom layer, macarons and brownies on the middle layer and scones with pots of clotted cream and jam on the top, and of course, tea or coffee.

It must have been a magnificent building in its heyday. Now it’s a bit tired and in need of some TLC. The ballroom floor, however is lovely to dance on. No slippy patches and no uneven floorboards. You can feel the 12,000 square feet suspended floor move gently when there are a lot of dancers on it. It’s almost nine times the size of the ‘Strictly’ studio dance floor and is made from 30,602 separate blocks of mahogany, oak and walnut. We danced quite a few of the sequence dances and also attempted a waltz and a foxtrot, the latter being much more successful than the waltz. Practise is required for sure!
Great fun watching the two organists on the stage and seeing the big white Wurlitzer organ and its pianist rising and falling while being played.

After our almost four hours of dancing and eating, we changed shoes back to normal walking ones and went down to a windy beach for a wander. The tide was miles out, so no chance of a paddle today. We walked along the sand to the Central Pier and took a few photos, then walked back to have fish ’n’ chips at Harry Ramsden’s along with half the bus party!

Fed and watered Scamp suggested a walk along to the North Pier and we fought our way through the crowds to get there. Just like Glasgow on a Thursday night. Drunk youngsters everywhere. We were both sober, I was driving later. We walked along the pier then Scamp noticed that our bus was just stopping in front of the Tower Ballroom, so we headed back at a much less leisurely pace. We needn’t have worried, we had plenty of time to catch our breath before everyone was on board.

Stewart organised a singsong on the way home, still using his home made LoFi. Just as we were almost passing Larkhall he played Donald Where’s Yer Troosers! I was not amused and told them that I absolutely hated that song and always have.

It had been raining on and off all of the journey home although it had stayed dry for most of the day. By the time we got back to Hamilton the rain was lashing down. Drove home and we had a wee drink to celebrate the day. Would we do it again? Probably, but maybe not next year.

In a break from tradition, this is not the PoD. I just thought you’d like to see inside the Tower Ballroom.

Tomorrow we’ll have a rest day, hopefully.

 

 

Slippin’ and a Slidin’ – 22 July 2023

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We were dancing in a restricted floor today. About a third of the floor was cordoned off because of the risk of sliding on a very slippery floor. Something to do with a kids party last week.

Only four couples and the teachers so the reduced dancing space wasn’t really much of a problem. Nobody seemed to know what had been applied to the floor, presumably to clean up after last week’s kids party, but it did make the floor quite slippy. Thankfully resourceful Jane had a solution. She poured some water in the corner of the area we were dancing in and encouraged everyone to dip their shoes in it and then wipe it off. It was supposed to make the suede soles more grippy, and it worked!

Two sequence dances to begin with then we launched into the nitty gritty of the Rumba routine we’ve been learning. We knew the figures in the rumba, but these were the little nuances, what Tom Paxton called “the John Wayne dance steps”, the details. If you don’t know who Tom Paxton is, Google him! We learned a lot, especially from Jayne’s instructions, but also from watching Stuart’s footwork. It brought the Rumba to life and made us feel we were ‘dancing’ it, not just going through the motions.

Another sequence dance to allow us to clear our heads, then a little Cha-Cha routine that was composed almost entirely from figures we already knew. I think this was a hastily ‘invented’ cha-cha to have something that could be danced within the reduced area we had available. We picked up most of it and Scamp filmed the demo and shared it on the class WhatsApp page, so we all have something to work on. Again there was an emphasis on the quality of the steps. This may be because we’re booked for a trip to the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool soon!

We drove home along a busy M8, but one without roadworks or 40mph restrictions. Oh Joy! We went to Tesco when we got home because I quite fancied a roll ’n’ sausage, but either the bakers were on strike or the ovens had packed in, but there were no rolls to be had, not real rolls, anyway. They had soft baps, but they’re not real rolls, not Scottish Roll! So it had to be a plain sliced loaf instead.

Dinner had been discussed on the drive home and we settled on Chicken & Pea Traybake. Simplicity itself unless you are scaling it up to feed six as we were a year or two ago in Cumbria. Thankfully it was only the two of us today and all the requirements were available in Tesco.

I was going to go for a walk in St Mo’s after lunch, but there was a soaking drizzle by then and I wasn’t interested in getting wet just to take some photos, so instead I took some photos in the garden instead. I still got wet, yes, but at least it wasn’t far to go to get into the dry again. PoD went to a bunch of daisies. I liked the fact that when I’d strimmed this area in the garden yesterday, I’d deliberately missed the daisies. I hate to chop them down, the are such survivors!

Tomorrow looks better than today, but there are no certainties about the weather these days.

An early rise – 15 July 2023

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Well, definitely an early rise for me.

We were up, fed, watered, washed (and in my case shaved), dressed and out the door by 9.45am, ready to drive out to Brookfield for our first dance class in a fortnight and only the second dance class in over a month. We were both a bit apprehensive about how we would get on with this dancing lark. We had had a half hour practise last night and it had gone fairly well. I’d remembered more than I thought I would from the Quickstep and we’d pushed it beyond that up to the end of Scamp’s knowledge of the steps.

We had our usual sequence dance to start with. Then instead of the quickstep, the teachers took us through the Rumba routine we’d been learning a fortnight ago. It’s similar to, but not the same as the rumba we learned during Lockdown. It’s our “Zoom Rumba”. Today, as usual they inserted new figures and then tweaked some of the elements we already knew. That worked well, mainly because we already had a good basis to work from.

Next was quickstep and we struggled through it, and again they added new figures but explained them well and allowed us to film them so we could go over them at home.

Overall, it was a worthwhile morning with a lot of consolidation of what we already knew as well as adding in new material. I felt we got round the floor quite well, not perfect by any manner or means, but adequately.

Drove home and after discussing what lunch and dinner would be, we settled on going to the Red Deer on the way home and having a late lunch or and early dinner, call it what you will. Scamp had fish ’n’ chips and I had gammon steak, both served with chips.

It had been raining during the night last night and although it was dry and bright, it looked like it might return to rainy weather later. However, the wet weather stayed away and we had a dry afternoon. I went out for an hour in St Mo’s and got some insect photos. Scamp said she was reading, but I’m sure she was poring over those new moves we’d filmed.

Watched the first night of the Proms and disagreed about a new version of Finlandia. Scamp thought it was too fast and I liked it.

PoD was a cobbled together photo of mating Burnet Moths, technically it’s ‘focus stacking’ and it worked.

No firm plans for tomorrow. If the weather is good we may go for a walk, otherwise we’ll go shopping. Either way, an early rise is not on the cards.

Souda for Chania – 10 June 2023

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The first Greek town this year, although Scamp does remind me that it’s Crete, not Greece!

We had breakfast in the posh restaurant we ate in last night. Sensible plates of food for once. Then we watched the sail in on a beautiful morning.

With no tours booked, we just watched until the queue for the bus calmed down then walked out and caught the €1.50 bus from Souda, where we were docked, into Chania town. We had to stand for the 15min journey which was a pain in the legs.

It was a bit busy in the town, In fact it was very busy, but it was Saturday and you have to remember that. My watch wasn’t syncing yet with my phone, so I also had to remember to add on an extra two hours to the time.

We walked through the shops, all of which seemed to sell leather goods, but didn’t buy anything. We did go for coffee in a wee cafe in a town square. We walked as far as the harbour and watched the horse drawn carriages going past. We both felt sorry for the horses.

At night we had another posh dinner sat next to a crazy man and his wife. He was telling the steward how he had a machine gun fitted to the front of his mini. He said it kept everyone out of his way. Scamp tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped as if he’d been slapped and shouted “Don’t touch me!” If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was Ray Furminger’s brother. That same kind of sarcastic humour. Great fun was had by all apart from his wife who smiled and shook her head at everything he said.

Dancing at night to music by a girl from the entertainment team. Sitting with two women who were dancers, certainly better than me, but they had the advantage of being sober.

Tomorrow it’s Piraeus

Things we’ll remember:

  • The sail in.
  • The man with the Barrel Organ.
  • Horses pulling two seater gigs in Chania.
  • Old church or cathedral. Beautiful, but dark inside.
  • Two weans chasing pigeons across the church square.
  • Watching the wee fish swimming in the harbour.
  • Overcrowded buses, going in to town and returning to Souda.
  • Mad Saturday traffic.
  • Being served ‘sit down’ breakfast in the posh restaurant.