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.

I wish... I cycled to work (part 7)

When facing an uphill struggle, find your own rhythm and go at your own pace.

Despite packing as lightly as I could, my rucksack felt heavy and cumbersome. Terry and Mark, who had decided to cycle to work with me on Sunday morning and had already teased me for being 10 minutes late, thought my bulky bag was hilarious.

I needed to carry a change of clothes and a packed lunch. I was commuting to work, not going out for a leisurely ride. I also needed to carry lots of food and water to keep me going on the bike. I refused to run out of energy this time!

I checked my watch. 7:15am. Would I make it to Southborough by 8:45?

The three of us pedalled up onto Ashdown Forest in thick mist. We said good morning to people in hi-vis jackets waiting for an organised cycling event (I was tempted to shout out that we were the breakaway group) and accelerated downhill, remarking on patches of warm and cold air that reminded us of patches of warm and cold water in the sea. 

I lost sight of Terry and Mark before the bottom. I wasn't taking any risks on the damp road surface. When I finally caught up with them I hitched a ride in Terry's slipstream, keeping my front wheel inches away from his back one. Saving my legs. Saving my energy for the hill out of Groombridge.

It paid off. I couldn't believe how well I climbed the hill with a rucksack. I felt bad about cycling away from Mark but I needed to keep my cadence high and bounce in the pedals. I needed to find my own rhythm and go at my own pace. Besides, Terry soon cycled away from me. I crested the hill and cruised through dense woodland on my own.

Suddenly a deer leapt into the road in front of me. I squeezed my brakes hard and the bike skidded and the back wheel slid sideways, startling the deer which turned 180º and bolted back into the woods. I eased off the brakes. The bike straightened and I sat back down in the saddle. 

Wow. Fear, exhilaration, wonder - I felt all three emotions in that single moment. What a beautiful creature. Stunning. I only wish I hadn't scared it.

Terry, Mark and I regrouped at the next junction. It was 8:20am. Only 25 minutes to go! We cycled together through Fordcombe, Penshurst and Bidborough, and I headed the charge into Southborough just before 8:45am.

I had done it! I had cycled to work. Well, we had cycled to work. And contrary to Google's prediction, it was exactly 22 miles.

Now all I had to do was a day's work and then cycle home again...

Fortunately work was less physically demanding than normal, and I felt recharged for the ride back. So much so that I accepted Terry's extra challenge and took a detour to Hartfield, increasing the return journey to 28.34 miles. 

I had cycled 50.34 miles in one day! Hilly miles. With a rucksack on my back. I was amazed by what I had achieved.

At the beginning of the month I wished that I cycled to work. Yesterday I did it. Over the course of 4 weeks I rode my bike 12 times, experienced cramping calfs and burning thighs, consumed thousands of calories, braved the roads after dark, almost hit a deer and travelled a total of 274.44 miles. That's roughly the equivalent of cycling from London to Newcastle.

Now that I've cycled to work once, I can do it again. I'm fitter, stronger and more confident riding my bicycle than I was at the beginning of the month. Next time I won't worry so much about the hills or the traffic or whether I've eaten enough. I know I can do it.

In a previous post I wrote that my brother-in-law Terry likes to know how far and fast I've cycled. Why? Because he's talked me into entering the wiggle New Forest 100 Sportive with him on Sunday 12th October.

I'm going to cycle 81 miles in one go. Wish me luck!

What do you wish you could do? Start doing it in October and amaze yourself.

I wish... I cycled to work (part 6)

Work out what your body needs to keep going.

"I don't want to do this anymore," I whined, hunched over my bicycle and weaving along the road at a painfully slow pace.

It was Friday evening, dark and getting cold. Terry and I had just cycled to Seaford and back. 35 miles. We were 7 miles from home. 

I had run out of energy. Hit the wall. Bonked. No power left in my legs. I thought my front light had been flickering for the past few minutes but I realised it was my vision distorting.

"I've got to stop. I've got to eat something," I said.

I turned into the entrance of the nearest driveway and stopped. Terry handed me an energy bar and I wolfed it down.

"Have you got any food left?" he asked.

"Mars bar."

"Eat that too."

We stood there in the dark; me chewing, Terry waiting, bugs chirping. I washed it down with swigs of water.

We carried on.

My legs got stronger, but I was still slow. Terry nursed me through Palehouse Common and Ridgewood and into Uckfield. 

Home. I was so happy to be home. We had cycled 42.48 miles.

I had learned a valuable lesson: I need to eat more. I need to eat more before a ride and during a ride. Anything to maintain the glycogen levels in my muscles. Energy bars, malt loaf, fruit cake, jelly sweets...

I could think of worse things!

I also learned that I needed to change my saddle. To put it bluntly, I had a sore bottom and a raw undercarriage. It wouldn't do. So I detached the saddle and replaced it with the saddle from my old bike.

Yesterday I cycled to Tunbridge Wells for a job. Not as far as my usual workplace, but not far short. I ate Mars bars and fruit cake galore to fuel me, and I felt OK. Even my bottom.

Don't get me wrong; it was hard work, especially uphill with a rucksack on my back. But I didn't run out of energy. And when I arrived I felt elated.

This Sunday 28th September I will cycle to work and back. My usual workplace in Southborough. The hardest and hilliest cycle yet.

What is your wish of the month? What could you do this week to move one step closer to fulfilling it?

I wish... I cycled to work (part 5)

Be inspired by professionals. Don't compare yourself with them.

The Tour of Britain came to my home town on Saturday. In honour of this week-long race for professional cyclists, Uckfield pulled out all the stops; roads were closed, bunting strung up, crowds turned out, and our community radio station went into overdrive.

I waited on a hill outside of town with my sister Rachel, her husband Terry and my nephew and niece. Mark was also there with his better half Wendy. We cheered and waved flags and took photos. And that was just for the police motorbikes.

I watched in awe as the cyclists cruised up the hill. They were halfway though a 226 kilometre stage. That's approximately 141 miles. 141 miles!!! 

They made it look effortless.

Back home, I watched the conclusion of the race on television. A helicopter-mounted camera streamed footage of the riders racing into Brighton at breakneck speed for mile after mile. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

How do they do that?

Needless to say, I was inspired by what I saw. So much so that, during my ride this evening, I imagined myself attacking up Ditchling Beacon and sprinting along Madeira Drive to win the stage.

Reality didn't quite match the fantasy. I hit a couple of potholes, the zip on my saddle bag broke, and I spat gnats. But I did move one step closer to being able to cycle to work and back:

I cycled 29.10 miles!

No comparison with the professionals. But then I'm not comparing my ride with theirs. Or that of other cyclists. I'm comparing it with my first ride of the month. At twice the distance, it makes me feel pretty good. :-)

What is your wish of the month? Wouldn't you like to see yourself improve?