In the interests of postponing my foray into the garden, where I have to pot up some primroses - ugh, hate the twee little things, can't think why I bought them, though at least I rebelled and got blue ones instead of those little yellow patches of fairy vomit - I thought I'd put down some thoughts on dancing.
While enjoying a bit of sneaky daytime telly over breakfast this morning, I stumbled across the repeated final of Sky's Got To Dance and found myself sticking it out to the bitter end, even though I already knew who'd won. A little chap who looks like he's being remotely animated by the Devil's fiddle and has more talent than is fair or natural in a squirt that age. Still, I don't mind dance shows. The ice-skating one is pushing things a bit too far; there's only so much exposed gusset one can take on a Saturday teatime. But I quite like Strictly and stuff like that, so on the rare occasions when I'm allowed to watch these shows, I find myself drifting off into the old 'oh, what might have been' territory that lurks in the internal landscape of us all.
I should point out the delusional nature of this daydreaming. There is no abandoned potential or tragic knee-injury that cut short a wondrous career in showbiz. As a child I inflicted my presence on a tap dancing class in my village and infected the creative atmosphere for two or three years. All that time, the teacher kindly turned a blind eye to the fact that a new-born calf seemed to have stumbled into her class and was attempting to execute a heel-step, ball-change while being repeatedly bitten in the arse by a snake.
Needless to say, it became apparent that my future did not lie on the stage and the tap shoes were eventually hung up, or more accurately, flung into a skip with some relief by my long-suffering parents. I have never revisited that little corner of the cupboard in which I keep my unfulfilled dreams but, like many of the population, the resurgence of dance-based shows in recent years has inspired me to think about pushing those creaking hips back into service.
Until this morning that is, when Got To Dance finished and the new documentary about London's Pineapple Dance Studio started immediately afterwards. Fifteen minutes in and I had decided, once and for all, that the dance community was not a place where I would find my natural home. Putting aside for a moment the complete lack of talent and co-ordination that would possibly hinder my progress anyway, I found myself ogling a world of extraordinary numbskulls.
Beautiful bodies and fluid movements abound in the place - sadly, collective sanity appears to have been surrendered at the door in some sort of unspoken amnesty. Somewhere in a darkened back room at Pineapple, there must a box stuffed full of humility, self-awareness and realism, while their former owners bop, grind and jazz-hand their way towards an imagined life of fame, fortune and all the leotards they can fit in their Gucci hand luggage.
The life of the dancer is not for me. I'll just stick to embarassing the cats by jigging about in the kitchen to Stevie Wonder's Do I Do, imagining what might have been....
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