I am properly weird this week. Two extremes:

Yesterday I went into H&M and failed to find the Menswear department. Everything else had a sign, but Menswear? Nope. It was probably upstairs, but there was a big Womenswear sign pointing in that direction, and the assistants seemed to be watching, and I felt conspicuous and silly, so left. 

Then this evening I went to my sixth and final week of Ceroc dancing. It works on a six-week loop, so I knew that by the end of today I’d have learnt all the beginners’ steps. I’ve been determined to complete the six weeks, but by today my enthusiasm was waning. I can’t continue the classes beyond this week, plus it’s not like I know anyone else who can dance ceroc anyway. Learning had been fun, but it couldn’t go anywhere. I still wanted to complete my goal, but I figured I’d leave after the initial lessons. I hadn’t been practicing enough to hold my own during the freestyle practice sessions, and was fed up of sitting at the edge feeling like a tit.

Except I stayed the entire evening - which I’ve never done before - and danced with half the women in the room. Including really good people - I even asked Teacher Lady. I have no idea how this happened. Well, it was at least partly to do with a very nice lady called Karen telling me off and dragging me onto the dancefloor. But I hung about after that, inexplicably full of confidence, and had a great time. This is as far from H&M Andrew as you can get.

I’m worried about social awkwardness this weekend, and now I have no idea what to expect. I feel like S4 West Wing staffers, wondering which President Bartlet is going to turn up at the debate. 

Ho hum. Like I said: properly weird.

I’m going to St. Annes this weekend. It’s with my dancing group, and I’ve been twice before, but this time it’ll be without any of my regular partners. I wasn’t planning on going, but a couple of other people in the group talked me into it at the last minute¹. Which was actually really flattering, and I was quite touched.

But while it’s lovely that they asked me, I’m still going to stand out like a priapic Beefeater. I’m, um, a fair bit below the average age, and the only person not in a couple. I’m also hardly the life of the party at the best of times, what with my tendency to go quiet when nervous, and I don’t want to be the dude who hangs about making everyone feel slightly awkward. This could all be in my head, but I’m worried nonetheless.

There’ll be dances on the Friday and Saturday evenings, and I reckon they’ll be ok. At least, if the Friday is terribly awkward I’ll bow out of Saturday and go take photos of the seafront or something. But during the day on Saturday / Sunday I’ll feel bad about latching onto someone, so I figure I’ll disappear off somewhere else. I might try and talk someone into riding The Big One. And then maybe go to Blackpool Pleasure Beach.

Actually, no. I just wanted to write that. Blackpool is, um, not my favourite place in the world. In fact, twenty minutes on the promenade and I’ll happily lobotomise myself with a spade. If there is a hell, Blackpool has a franchise. Lots of people find its apparent isolation from the last fifty years quaint and charming, and I’m glad, but one visit was almost enough to turn me Catholic² and that’ll do, thank you³.

So I don’t really want to go there. So, erm, to anybody I haven’t offended: any recommendations for interesting things in west Lancashire? I haven’t had a proper look around as yet. I could head up to Kendal or thereabouts, but that seems a bit OTT. Plus I’ve been there before. Hmmm.

After five minutes of googling:

Oh, no. There’s a Doctor Who Museum. In Blackpool. Oh god.

1. everyone else booked six months ago, I booked three weeks ago [↩]
2. I’m not sure if they believe in Limbo this week, but it’s as good an explanation as any [↩]
3. I was going to say ‘life is too short’, but ironically another Blackpool visit would rid me of that particular trope [↩]

The ball was due to start at 20:00. I picked up the keys at 19:00, and I wasn’t anticipating any problems. We had plenty of time to set up the hall, which means plugging in the music system and laying out 8 tables/40 chairs, and I honestly thought we’d be sitting around for half an hour. Oh man, was this naive.

The first hitch came when a group of kids were hanging around outside the doors of the village hall. They weren’t at all threatening, but I had a car full of equipment parked around the corner, and I couldn’t get it all inside without leaving things unattended and out of sight, which made me nervous. Thankfully a very kind friend arrived early and at just the right moment, so we were able to transport it all without a problem. And at this point we entered some kind of time warp.

I initially thought we were doing fine, but things that took two minutes in my head actually took ten. I kept throwing disbelieving glances at the clock. We rushed to lay out the tables, then connected all the equipment. We switched it all on and…it didn’t work, causing utter panic calm analysis until I changed plug socket. Another friend arrived and we worked at full tilt laying out chairs and dressing the tables - candles take far longer than they should - until the first guests started arriving. And even then we weren’t ready for eight o’clock: the first song started at a quarter past.

My teachers do this on a monthly basis. I’m sure they’re into a routine by now, but I’d certainly never realised how much work it involves, in such a short time. There’s no way I’d have been able to do it without help, and I certainly got lucky there. Once everything was plugged in, arranged and working, we turned out the lights and started the music.

I took a bit of a risk with the music setup. My teacher’s setup uses a cd-player with two drives, and he switches CDs many times throughout the evening. But I decided, on Saturday morning, that I’d instead copy everything to a laptop and use an iTunes playlist to control the music. A playlist would be far less work, but also allow pleasing touches like cross-fading between tracks, and allow me to chop-and-change the running order without having to manage dozens of CDs. So, did this work better than the original system? Oh god yes.

It Just Worked. We went from manic work to sitting back and letting the laptop do its thing, occasionally bumping up the volume as more sound-wave-absorbing bodies entered the hall. Much more civilised than switching CDs, and far less stressful - I’d have been a nervous wreck by the end of the evening otherwise. The problems - and there were a few - only came when I took over from iTunes.

I had to take control about halfway through the evening, when we traditionally play a few sequence dances. These range from fun - the Sally-Ann cha-cha - to soporific - the Rumba One. Unfortunately, the cd collection from my teacher was inexplicably missing the sequence dances, so I hadn’t included any on the playlist. But somebody had the whole selection on an MP3 player, and asked if I could play from it. No problem, I said. Its audio connection was the same as the laptop’s, so I only needed to switch the cable.

So in future I’ll turn down the amplifier before ripping a 3.5mm cable out of its socket. Pretty inelegant. But the MP3 player worked fine, and once we were done with the sequence stuff I announced we’d switch back to regular dances, starting with two waltzes. I pressed play in iTunes, at which point my friend Nod noted that the cable was still in the MP3 player. Crap. Not thinking properly, I put the microphone down without turning it off, sending quite the jolt through the speakers, then (again) switched the 3.5mm cable without turning the amp down. This was later memorably described as the DONK URKK moment.

Then, later, I was asked for an argentine tango. As cool as that dance is, it’s generally a special request, and I didn’t have one on the laptop. So I pulled out an appropriate CD, announced the song, and hit play. Nothing happened, and I spotted an input toggle that needed to be switched. So I did. Here’s the thing: the volume of the laptop signal is very, very different from the CD player itself. The song had been playing for a few seconds before I hit the switch, so I’d missed the quiet start. I blasted the room with an extremely loud half-second of trumpets. Everyone jumped out of their skins, and I hit the volume and quickly apologised. As I said yesterday, I expect this is a rite of passage. Switching between the CD player and the laptop is something I would have practiced given a little more time, but I never quite got to it. Or, in hindsight, I could have just played the CD via the laptop (this has genuinely only just occurred to me). If there’s ever a next time, I’m doing that!

I didn’t have to play any more CDs, but I went back to the MP3 player later and managed to mute the cable-change noise. So at least there was a learning curve.

The microphone was difficult. I expect there are better ways to hold and speak into it, as I struggled to make myself understood. I announced a Rumba One sequence dance to little effect, so announced it again, but still had people shout questions about which dance it was. Having said that, nobody at my end of the room knew quite what to make of this, as they’d heard me perfectly clearly. So I’m not sure what was going on there.

The strangest moment of the evening came when six couples got up to dance the samba. Nobody dances the samba. Ok - people do, but it’s a difficult dance, and the only people willing to dance without hesitation are usually very good - and this puts off everybody else. As such I’d pulled one from the playlist earlier in the evening due to lack of interest; then, inexplicably, popularity! To make things even more surreal, later there were five couples Viennese Waltzing. That’s Just Weird. I put it down to awesome music

I was very nervous about some of my music choices. I wanted to modernise it a little, and I’d put in a few tracks I thought should work, but it’s hard to know for certain, without experience. Sure, I can pick up a three-beat waltz in Journey’s Open Arms, but I’ve been dancing for 3.5 years - how would a beginner cope? Actually, Open Arms was the probably the least successful track of the night. Many couples did ok, but a few were off the beat, and I felt bad. I pulled Faith Hill’s Cry and Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me as a result - no point pushing my luck.

But, cha-chas to The Corrs’ Breathless, Girls Aloud’s I Think We’re Alone Now and Kirsty MacColl’s In These Shoes all worked very well. And I obviously played the quickstep version of 9 to 5, which transcends awesome. But my favourite track was probably the samba to the Mamma Mia version of Dancing Queen. That’s just fun.

I really wanted to play the Roxanne tango from Moulin Rouge, but sadly it doesn’t work on its own: it has 90 seconds of the most dramatic (and therefore the best) tango I know, but then loses the tango beat, and 90 seconds just isn’t enough. I had the opposite problem with Cell Block Tango from Chicago, which is much too long, although I did play a mediocre three-minute cover.

A couple of songs had weird acoustics: the Sugababes’ Hole in the Head¹ seemed to bounce its bass notes off the far wall, which did very strange things to the beat. This didn’t seem to cause problems, happily.

At 23:00 I played the last waltzes and we packed up. The crowd were very helpful, and the tables and chairs were away in no time. Around 40 people arrived over the evening, which was actually a good number. It’s not the 60-80 that sometimes come, but I was happy with it: the hall had been full enough not to be sparse, without being too crowded. Most people vanished into the night, but everybody from my dancing group said they’d had a good time, which was reassuring. Hopefully everyone else had a reasonable time too - I guess I’ll see whether they say anything to my teacher come next month…

I’m rather relieved it’s all over, as it was a large mountain on my horizon. But I’d be perfectly happy to do it again, should the need arise. I also have much more respect for the amount of effort my teachers put in. But mainly I’m grateful to all the people who helped, when they had no reason to other than general decency. Without them it simply wouldn’t have worked.

—

PS. My clothes shopping trip with my sister worked out well. She didn’t take any of my usual nonsense, and found me some decent stuff to wear for last night. Form-fitting and smart is quite a different look for me - at least one person was quite taken aback. At least I now know what size I am at Next, too.

1. the specially downloaded radio edit, which inelegantly chops out the word ’shit’. I don’t know why this worried me, given that I later played Christina Aguilera’s Candyman uncensored. [↩]

My dance teachers run a monthly ball at the local village hall. But they’re away this month, so we’re running it ourselves. There are usually 60-80 people - it’s open to the general public - and I’m in charge of music. Terrified.

I collected the equipment and 175 cds on Thursday, and I’ve been playing working on it since. I was originally going to use the supplied 2-bay CD player to control the music, as it has some reasonable features. But I’d effectively be changing CDs 60 times, and there’s no way I wouldn’t mess that up at some point. So I’m using the laptop instead, and spent this afternoon importing all the relevant tracks. For all that iTunes annoys me sometimes, it did a stellar job in this regard. It’s very quick at grabbing cddb data, then I only needed to right-click ‘import’ on the appropriate song, and it copied/encoded it all in 10 seconds flat. I was worried this task would take forever, but it really wasn’t a problem.

I had a brief panic after I plugged the laptop into the speaker system and it buzzed like hell. Research indicated the laptop PSU was probably interfering - a common problem with laptops. I was all ready to go out and buy a USB sound card (if I could find one), but plugging the laptop into a separate socket from the amp/cd-player solved it. Phew.

I’ve been trying to put together a decent playlist. My teacher is occasionally accused of being a little old-fashioned in his music choices, but, having listened to many of the cds, I can see he’s filtering out a lot of awful pieces. Once you remove the pleasure-beach organ stuff (urgh) there’s only so much left (of the ballroom, anyway). There wasn’t really time to make informed choices, so I essentially grabbed random CDs and chose the tracks that appealed. 

I’m trying to update it a little. I don’t want to alienate the regulars, so there are plenty of classic tunes in there, but I’ve interspersed some new stuff too. Most of the cha-cha songs are regular pop music, for example (Girls Aloud ftw). Hopefully this will go down ok. There’s also a waltz by Journey. Everyone likes Journey, right? Yeah.

Getting increasingly nervous. In an ideal world I’d hit Play, iTunes would run down its 3hr playlist, pleasingly crossfading all tracks, and everyone would be happy. Hmmmm. We’ll see

I’ve been ceroc-ing for a month now, and it’s still fun.

I was with friends for the first two lessons, but it’s been just me since. I think I’ve done ok. Admittedly there was the asking-to-dance incident, but I was in exactly the same position this evening, and inspiration came in the form of “are you…free?”. Hardly Wilde, but good enough. Ra. I managed not to be weird for the entire evening (as far as I know). I was feeling a bit mouselike beforehand, and I thought I might quietly disappear after the beginners’ lesson, but a couple of people said nice things and boosted my confidence somewhat.

In fact, I even asked a few strangers to dance. Haven’t managed that before. I stuck to people at about my level, which isn’t really the idea, but is a good start. I’m too intimidated to ask the very-good dancers, despite exhortations from the staff to do so - I might have given it a try, but some dude at the bar was whining that he was stuck with a total beginner during the post-beginners-lesson practice session. Dick¹. But he made me nervous that I’d annoy somebody, so I stuck to relative-beginners I’d spotted during the first class. This worked well, although I was grabbed by somebody pretty good later on, and felt a bit rubbish. It’s a male-led dance to the extent that the women do nothing until the man indicates a particular move, and I could only remember five. I’ll have to revise everything I’ve learnt before next week.

This is easy, because after the second week we were given a DVD containing all the beginners’ moves. It has to be said that dancing in front of the tv, on your own, makes you feel pretty stupid. Worse is when you try one of the spins and fall over onto the sofa. Especially when you do it three times; I’m glad the blinds were shut. The DVD is a good idea, though - I can’t visualise the moves from a month ago, but it won’t be a problem to refresh my memory.

This evening the staff dancer told me I was good enough to join the intermediate class, which was a very kind thing to say. Unfortunately I can’t - I’m back at uni in three weeks and will lose my Thursday evenings - but it was nice to hear nonetheless. In two weeks I’ll have completed the looping-six-week beginners course, and that’ll have to do for now. Shame, actually - I’d quite like to get good at this.

1. the more I think about this, the more it annoys me. I think the staff would have kicked his ass if they’d heard - they try very, very hard to discourage that kind of thing. Most people are very friendly, thankfully. [↩]

I’m not the most socially adept person in the world. I’ve been trying hard to get better, and I’m an order of magnitude more confident than a couple of years ago, but I still get pretty nervous. I try to be more assertive where before I’d have just gone quiet, and this often works, but sometimes the nerves crash my speech centres and I say weird things.

It was just me at the ceroc dancing class last week, and the teacher told anyone on their own to move to one side of the floor. So I did, and there was a lady ahead of me. Obviously what’s required is some kind of phrase to indicate ‘we both appear to be partnerless, therefore it seems logical that we join up and join the class as a regular couple - is that ok?’. Except you obviously wouldn’t put it like that - you’d say something normal. Or you can do what I did and say ‘do you want to go?’.

She gave me a strange look - I was at this point trying to induce spontaneous self combustion - yet somehow figured out what I meant. Things got better after that, mainly because I said as little as possible all evening. It was still fun, though.

Do you want to go? Wtf? Having said that, I still can’t come up with the perfect statement. I’ve got as far as “Do you, um”.

We’ve been learning the routine from Thriller for five weeks or so. It’s great fun, providing you leave your dignity at the door, or just don’t care There are 15 of us, and with the first 2/3 of the dance roughly sorted, this evening we looked at the last section.

I don’t think anyone anticipated the levels of hip-action this would involve. I have never done such things before. We’re consoling ourselves that one day we’ll perform at a wedding, and it’ll totally be worth it.

One of our teachers filmed the routine, blessedly stopping after the first 2/3. If this makes it to YouTube - and, let’s face it, this is inevitable - I’m going to have no choice but to blog it. Despite what it may do for my readership, and their associated mental health. Sorry in advance.

I learnt the dance from Thriller this evening. Well, a fair chunk. I didn’t know it that well beforehand. It is phenomenally bonkers.

And a ridiculous amount of fun. Can’t do the side-to-side head thing, though. May need to practice that one in front of a mirror. With the curtains closed.

This is probably the greatest video I have ever seen on the Internets:

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

The ‘geek linked to it the other week, and it bears spreading.

A while ago I was casually asked if I’d stand in for a dance photographer at an upcoming event. I agreed before the question was finished, and Sunday was the day. It was nuts. Long periods of nothing punctuated by ten minutes of frantic activity. Fun though, at least once I stopped worrying all my equipment was going to spontaneously combust.

It was a dance competition day, held at a sports centre in Worcester. The prizes are for general prestige, as well as qualifying for entry into the larger events, and a crazy number of competitions are needed to cover the many levels of dancing. The ballroom section consisted of 12 competitions, each with 1-5 dances and most with multiple heats required to whittle people down to the final six. I don’t know how many rounds I watched, but it took almost 10 hours to get through the Juniors, Juveniles, Adult Ballroom and Adult Latin dancers.

I was photographing the trophy handovers and dancer line-ups. I had it easy, really, as most competitors were experienced and didn’t need to be told ‘left foot back, right shoulder forward’. Still, I had trouble getting them to move close enough to each other that there were no gaps. I thought I was doing an ok job, but much chimping¹ of the Ballroom line-ups showed various spaces through which you could drive a milk float. But I got all the necessary shots, thank goodness. At one point the announcer was ahead of me, and the trophy was being handed to the next winners as I’d just finished photographing the previous line-up. I got the shot by sliding into position, clicking the shutter before I’d finished moving. This either looked extremely cool or completely stupid.

Then, right at the end, I sold a photo! I’ve never sold anything to a stranger before. One of the winners wanted a copy of her line-up photo. I was taken aback and had no idea about price, but she wasn’t bothered and told me to send an invoice. Quite a little milestone, really.

I continued my project of trying to take dancing photographs that don’t completely suck, and by the end of the evening had enough confidence to start playing around. I put my wireless flash in various positions - it only got knocked over once, although that was bad - and wandered around the room trying to get some interesting angles. I haven’t had a chance to process them yet, but there were a couple that seemed ok. Here’s an early version:

The light level was such that the flash was on full power. Poor dancers.

1. incidentally, anyone who says chimping is a bad thing can bite me - instinctive chimping no matter what the scenario isn’t a good idea, but 90% of the time checking the rough image is a bloody good plan. Yes, you should know roughly what the image is going to look like, but a) people make mistakes b) people have to learn. So there. [↩]

I headed to a local Ball last Saturday. It was a reasonably posh affair arranged by the Midland Amateur Dancers club, and in a large octagonal hall that I remember being daunting for beginners (right angles are the norm). I was on my own, and unfortunately didn’t know anybody other than my dance teachers. I was probably the youngest attendee - the average age was likely late 50s - which makes it slightly awkward to find a partner. Having said that, it wasn’t really the kind of night for asking strangers to dance anyway¹. I ended up having just the one cha-cha, with my teacher.

It wasn’t a total loss, though. When taken to my seat I immediately noticed two enormous Nikons on the table, and the guy next to me turned out to be official photographer for the World Championships(!). I introduced myself and we got chatting. I asked for advice on photographing dances, as I’ve been churning out mediocre results for years. His primary tip was to know the subject - he was a competitive dancer for 40 years, so could anticipate routines and their best photographic moments. He was photographing the night’s competition, and generously made a point of showing me how to handle the situation. It’s actually ok to physically move people into good positions - apparently people’s desire to look good in photos outweighs usual social norms (which sounds vain, but isn’t really).

It also helps if you have a stupidly powerful flash. Dance venues are often enormous and it can be tricky to balance light across the photo. Unfortunately this size offers few opportunities to soften light by bouncing it, so blasting across the floor is the only option. I don’t like direct flash much, and full-frontal light doesn’t do dancers any favours imho - I might work on some wireless off-camera setups, maybe work it into an appropriate uni project at some point.

I was then abruptly asked if I’d be stand-in photographer at a competition in May! Yikes. I agreed as it’ll be great experience, but I’m nervous already. I practiced a little on the night:

Most of my shots came out underexposed, which was deliberate - I’d rather have a sharp, darker image than a properly-exposed shot in which the dancers are blurred. I brought back much of the detail in Lightroom, and my newly-arrived copy of Photoshop got a workout too. Colours are a nightmare, however.

I hadn’t been looking forward to going alone, but it turned out to be a surprisingly interesting and productive evening. I learnt a lot, and I’m very grateful to the Proper Photographer for putting up with my annoying questions.

1. possibly a rationalisation, but my teachers are normally good at pointing out suitable candidates, and even they were at a loss [↩]

I’ve never watched Dancing With The Stars, the US version of Strictly, but I might have to start: the new series line-up includes rationalist-hero Penn Jillette. Wow. Via SCB.

The six-week jive course finished this evening. It started off with 15-20 couples, but by today’s lesson was down to 6. This surprised me. We’ve been to similar classes for Argentine Tango and American Smooth and had the same thing happen, but they were both listed as for ‘beginners’. It’s not too odd that people would drop out of a beginners class, but the jive was ‘intermediate’ so you’d think experienced people would know what to expect…

Having said that, I found it tough. I failed spectacularly during the first week as the slower version of the dance confused the hell out of me, but I eventually figured out how it worked, and by the 3rd week it was coming naturally. We learnt a new, more difficult, step each week, and I struggled more than I expected. I think this is because I’m used to finding the jive easy - the moves we’ve learnt over the last few years are now so familiar that I don’t have to concentrate much. The short course threw a lot of new information at me in a short space of time, which came as more of a shock than I anticipated. This is definitely a good thing! I’ve been complacent in improving my jive, so a bit of shock therapy was definitely needed. The course culminated in a mental frenzy of spin that’ll look great if we can remember it at the next public dance.

The aforementioned Tango and Smooth classes were great, but we’ve forgotten the moves in the year since the course. I’m writing out the jive steps in language my teacher would balk at - spinny bit step-step underarm whoosh - so hopefully we’ll remember this one.

There’s a Midlands-wide shortage¹ of young male ballroom dancers. I may have to rent out my body. It’s the right thing to do.

1. link fixed [↩]

I was at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall on Sunday for Symphony Ballroom. A friend bought the tickets in bulk last summer, and I’m pretty sure I just agreed to something dancing-related, without knowing the full details - I turned up with little clue as to what I’d be watching. It turned out to be the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra playing tunes from the 30s/40s/50s, sometimes accompanying ballroom and latin dancers. And it was good fun.

It was my first visit to the Symphony Hall¹ and it’s quite the venue. I generally see professional dancers in large, boring rooms², so it had a strikingly different atmosphere. I was mildly concerned when I realised the show was as much orchestra as dancing, just because sitting still and listening to music usually makes me antsy. Also, big band stuff isn’t particularly my kind of music - I don’t mind it, but it doesn’t do much for me - and I briefly wondered if I’d need to fake not being bored. But it wasn’t a problem: the music was fine, and it turns out that orchestras are pretty visually interesting. I’d never seen a full-size orchestra before, and I don’t know all that much about instruments, so it was a surprising amount of fun working out where all the noises were coming from.

A Grey Haired Old Chap was playing the harp, which is weird as I thought you had to be a young lady to learn that instrument, but I liked him as he looked cheery. Some didn’t. In fact, some looked miserable as sin. Man On Large Drums played, we think, twice, both times for about ten seconds, and spent the rest of the time glowering and possibly plotting ways to lure small animals into his custom-built Shed of Death. Also, there was a Man With Sticks. Just two sticks, which he hit together like I used to in ‘the percussion section’ at school. I have to give him credit as the irregular rhythms were off the beat and did actually sound rather difficult, but the sight of a Man With Sticks reading music is intrinsically funny, and I couldn’t help smiling.

You’d expect professional dancers to put on a good show, but their performances were particularly impressive due to the lack of space. The stage in front of the orchestra was wide but extremely shallow - there were perhaps three strides between the conductor and the edge - yet Anton and Erin somehow pulled off a Viennese Waltz, amongst many others. The Latin couple were last minute replacements for Ian and Camilla and did a good job despite looking rather nervous. Their paso doble was great fun.

I never used to enjoy watching ballroom. The latin was fun and entertaining, but the ballroom impressive yet false - fixed smiles and set routines left a robotic impression on me. I remember describing latin as ‘every couple trying to be different’ and ballroom as ‘every couple trying to be the same’. It was always much more fun to do than to watch. But in the last year I’ve learnt much more technique, and at some point the concept of grace clicked. I now seem to ‘get’ the flow and beauty of the ballroom dances, and I react emotionally rather than just intellectually. Technically speaking, I can also now see how the professionals are doing the same things as me, just a thousand times better. It’s difficult to pick up technique tips from tv demonstrations due to rapidly changing angles, so a live demonstration was great. The footwork was too fast, but the overall stance and floorcraft was understandable. Given the reactions of the crowd, I could certainly do worse than emulate Anton du Beke

It was a good afternoon. During the interval I recognised somebody from photos I’d seen on their blog, which is the first time that’s ever happened. I said hi, hopefully without sounding too odd, and they turned out to be very friendly³. I think the show was only on for a couple of days, and isn’t touring or anything, and I’m glad I was able to see it. Interesting and entertaining in lots of ways, especially for people unfamiliar with live orchestras.

1. I asked my guitar teacher if he’d been, and he casually replied that he’d “played there once or twice” [↩]
2. Strictly excluded - you don’t get much more bling than that [↩]
3. natch - haven’t found an unfriendly blogger yet [↩]