I wish... I could street dance (part 4)

It's OK to miss a beat, as long as you keep going.

I needed practice. So I practised. I cleared some space in my studio after work, found the recording of street dance lesson two, and reenacted it. I did it over and over again, observing my performance in the reflections in the windows and praying that nobody was looking in. I got better. I think. The real test would come in the next street dance lesson.

Expecting me to tell you all about lesson three? Forget it. I didn't go.

There must have been a good reason, right? The lesson must have been cancelled or my car broke down or the Government introduced an emergency law banning street dance? 

Nope. Sorry. None of those things. 

The truth is, I didn't feel like going. I didn't want to. I didn't feel up to it. 

Doesn't sound like me, does it.

Thursday was my day off work. That's not unusual. I work most weekends so I often take a day off mid-week. I did what I normally do on a day off: I slept late, made myself a huge breakfast, and sat around in my pyjamas watching Hornblower. 

OK, I don't normally watch Hornblower. But it's the latest DVD boxset I've got my hands on, and like all DVD boxsets, it's completely addictive and I can't wait to watch the next episode. Play all!

It was all going so well until I ducked to avoid the postman. I didn't want him thinking I was a lazy slob. So I decided to do something productive with my day. I got showered, got dressed, and set about tidying up. Not just a superficial tidy either. A proper clear-out.

That's when I found the Christmas card. The Christmas card that my ex-girlfriend had given me 9 months ago, just before she left me.

It was like being punched in the guts. My breathing went funny. My eyes welled up. Suddenly I was back in our flat in London, laughing and chasing each other and calling each other Muffin and planning all the things we were going to do, like get married and move to Derbyshire and have wellies at the back door. Then we were arguing and crying and she was walking out of the door with a suitcase. Like in a soap opera. Only this was really happening. And there I was sitting in the dark again, hurt and alone and utterly devastated.

I tried to tidy my way out of a deep, dark pit of sadness. I threw out photos of her, a T-shirt she'd bought me in Canada, Christmas presents that I'd bought her and were still wrapped up in shiny paper. But it just made things worse. 

I went for a walk in the woods to distract me. It helped. For a while. Then the memories came back. We were going to get married this month; Saturday the 11th. We'd booked a hotel. She'd bought a dress. By the time I should have been leaving for my street dance lesson, all I wanted to do was curl up and go to sleep and make everything go away. I shut my bedroom door and switched off my phone. I didn't want to see anyone or talk to anyone. 

I'm gutted that I missed the street dance lesson. Heaven knows I need it! But I'm not going to feel guilty about missing it. I was in no position to dance. Unless foetal position is a street dance pose. I doubt it. 

I'll go to the next lesson. It's OK to miss a beat, as long as you keep going.

What is your wish of the month? Have you kept going?

I wish... I could street dance (part 3)

Concentrate on what you need to do, not what other people are doing.

I held my kit bag tightly against my chest. I was sat on the floor, back against the wall mirrors, watching fifteen children perform a street dance a mere spin kick away from my face.

It was incredible. They were incredible. I marvelled at their slick, fast spins and kicks and - I kid you not - back flips! I almost leapt up with excitement. The routine ended with all of the dancers diving to the floor in a caterpillar motion. 

We whooped and clapped. We being the adult street dancers who had arrived early and were invited in to watch.

"Wow, how good are they!" I said to Richard, the guy I'd met last week, as we exited and walked to the other dance studio.

"Yeah," he said, "Now we've got to follow that."

Fortunately the talented little blighters left the building before our class started. Our instructor, JP, taught us another eye-wateringly quick routine, this time to The Enforcer by 50 Cent. "Fiddy cent," said JP, correcting us. "Fiddy."

I had never heard The Enforcer before, but it didn't half have a good intro; big sound, lots of bass. I was already nodding to it.

The routine was a corker. It felt good, and looked it too, from what I could see of the other dancers. What's more, my timing felt sharper than the week before. But a familiar problem arose whenever JP shouted, "From the top!" I would start well, then halfway through I'd forget the next move and be left scrambling to catch up.

I got annoyed with myself. I knew that I could do the individual moves. I knew I could piece them together in short sequences. Why couldn't I remember the whole thing?

I realised that I had spent the entire lesson watching and copying JP. When he wasn't dancing, I was lost. What I should have done is learned the moves from JP, then practiced them by myself without watching anybody else. That way I would have learnt the routine by heart.

"Let's film this and put it on the Face of the book," said JP, running to the door five minutes before the end of the lesson.

What? Film it? Put it on Facebook? Are you mental? We've only just learnt it. And some of us can't even say that!

JP returned with a colleague who whipped out a smartphone and asked the class if anyone objected. A few of us in the back row glanced nervously at each other, but nobody refused. And so, holding our hands in front of us, and facing the floor, we waited for our cue.

This is what happened... on the Face of the book.

Did you spot me? Yep, I'm the prat at the back in the orange T-shirt. Boy am I glad I was obscured for most of that.

If that experience has taught me anything, it's that I need to practice. I need to concentrate on what I am doing, not what other people are doing.

Maybe I need to stop hiding at the back and step forwards.

What is your wish of the month? Have you been taking small steps forward?

I wish... I could street dance (part 2)

Doing something for the first time is less scary than thinking about doing it.

Last Thursday I attended my first street dance lesson. I stood at the back of the room behind rows of other dancers and faced mirrors that entirely covered the opposite wall. The instructor pressed play on his MP3 player and stood at the front. He counted us in: "One two three four-"

...

Six days earlier, the morning after I announced my new wish, I caught sight of my reflection in the bathroom mirror. My hair had receded another inch overnight, I was sure of it. 

I can't learn to street dance, I thought. I'm too old! 

My friends were kind. Online, a few of them said they liked my wish and that I was very brave. To my face, they said nothing. 

Then the videos came... One friend sent me a video called Rock Stars Dancing Like Your Dad, which should have been called A Dad Dancing Like Rock Stars In His Back Yard In Fast Forward. Another forwarded me Burning Star Sampoornesh Babu Love Scene, in which a tubby mustachioed singer heel-kicks a meteorite and twerks at the camera.

Oh no, I thought, that's going to be me. An embarrassment. Ridiculous. A bad dancer.

I was undecided about whether to go to the street dance lesson until I received an email from Annalies at Marina Studios on Monday, asking me to confirm which class I wanted to attend. Adult street dance on Thursday at 9pm, I emailed back. There. Done. No going back. You will do this Richard.

Thursday evening came quickly. I psyched myself up. I stuck a Street Dance CD in the ghetto blaster (old skool!) and jumped around my room. Come on then, let's do this!

What am I going to wear? Crap. Should have thought about this earlier. I revisited the website. It recommended loose clothing like leggings or shorts. Hmm. My shorts are all Bermuda-style or khaki. No good. I remembered I had some black tracksuit bottoms with my cycling gear. They were a bit buffed and shiny in the crotch, but they would do.

Next? A T-shirt. Easy. I've got a Quiksilver T-shirt with polaroid-style pictures of a skateboarder on it. Doing jumps. On a street. It's so street that it's got an actual street on it. 

I put it on. It looked... wrong. And the off-white colour looked bland over my tracksuit bottoms. What about a black T-shirt? No, stupid. Black over black? I'd look like a ninja. Eventually I chose a bright orange T-shirt with a garish pattern and oversized brand name. Perfect.

Finally, trainers. Got. One pair of white Nike runners. Sorted.

All that remained was to make my head look acceptable. I put contact lenses in, poked at my hair with wax, and plucked unwanted hairs out of other places. Especially grey ones. It was a futile attempt to pass myself off as twentysomething, but by God I would give it my best shot.

I was running late, but at last I was ready. I took a photo to record the moment. If I hadn't felt so nervous, I would have smiled.

I drove to Brighton in a hurry. It was dark and rainy outside but inside I was singing and dancing to my Street Dance CD. It would be OK. It would be OK.

To my dismay, the entrance to Marina Studios was glowing with unflattering fluorescent light. Through the floor to ceiling windows I could see small groups of young women standing about or reclining on sofas. I walked straight past them to the reception and tried not to imagine them pointing and laughing at my emerging bald spot.

Fifteen minutes later I was standing in a dance studio. I had been ignored by two women sitting nearest to me in the waiting area but I had summoned up enough courage to introduce myself to another man. His name was Richard as well, which helped break the ice. 

I also got talking to a woman in the queue called Piya (I am guessing at the spelling), another mature first-timer. Although the average age in the class was between 20 and 30, there were at least two women in their forties or fifties. Piya and I had been worried about being the oldest. Now we were there, we didn't feel old at all.

It helped that the dance instructor, JP, was no teenybopper either. But he could move fast and loose and he pushed us very hard to do the same. In a fun way though, with lots of jokes. I laughed a lot. At him, but also at myself. In my very first street dance lesson JP got me boyband sliding, hip rotating, spin jumping and bum wiggling. I have no idea what it looked like but it was a lot of fun to do.

At the end of the lesson JP split the class into two groups. Why? To perform to each other! I felt incredibly self-conscious, but I focussed on remembering the sequence of moves we had learned to the song Get On Up by James Brown. I wasn't a complete disaster - I hope - but my solid start gradually unravelled until I was flailing about one beat behind the regular dancers. I finished with a flourish though, leaping and then sliding to a stop.

I was drenched in sweat. We all were. One hour of intense dance will do that to you. We gave ourselves a round of applause, fetched our bags and said our goodbyes. Piya asked me if I would be back next week. Definitely, I said.

The next lesson is tomorrow.

What is your wish of the month? What could you do for the first time instead of just thinking about it?

I wish... I could street dance.

I expect you're shaking your head, laughing or feeling sorry for me at this point. I mean, come on, who am I kidding? Street dance?! I'm about as street as Emmerdale.

Hear me out.

I love dancing. There, I've said it. When I went to nightclubs and house parties in my teens and twenties I was itching to dance. I lost count of the number of times I stood cursing at a bar waiting to get served whilst the DJ spun one of my favourite tunes. Or how irritated I felt when the lights came up on the dance floor.

Gradually, without noticing, dancing slipped off my radar. Nights out bopping in a club or pogoing at a house party became nights foot-tapping in a bar, chatting in a pub, or putting the world to rights over wine in a friend's dining room. A natural progression, but a dancing regression.

I missed dancing. I dabbled in lessons in my late twenties and early thirties; salsa, which confused me with its three-beat rhythm, and swing, which was fun but didn't inspire me or my girlfriend (at the time) to return the following week. 

Nowadays the only dancing I do is at weddings, sending up The Inbetweeners Movie whilst trying not to step on small children. Often, by the time I'm sufficiently inebriated to venture onto the vast floodlit dance floor, I'm jostled into a circle around the newlyweds and kicked in the legs.

I wish I danced more. I wish I danced to modern music. I wish I danced like dancers in the music videos I watch on TV every morning (depressing news can wait until lunchtime). So that's what I'm going to do. This month I will learn to street dance. 

Some of my friends will probably give me a ribbing. Dancing is not a traditionally masculine activity in our society, is it? But films and TV shows have tried to correct that: Billy Elliot made ballet acceptable for boys, Strictly Come Dancing has seen cricket and rugby players foxtrot in sequins, and street dance group Diversity won Britain's Got Talent.

So tonight I searched online for a street dance class. I found one in Brighton. I'm going to contact the instructor and ask if I can join.

By the end of October I will learn to street dance. Beginner standard, obviously. Thirty-something white guy standard, definitely.

If I can face the humiliation, I might even show you some moves.

What is your wish of the month for October? I'd love to cheer you on.