Naughty naughty

Oh what a bad little blogger I've been, abandoning my faithful readers for the excitement of a five-day volunteer workshop culminating in the oh-so-monumental International Volunteers' Day which was celebrated on Monday. Yes, I thought you might have missed that. Nevermind, it's International Volunteer Week for another couple of days so spread the word...

Remember those dance lessons? Well, I missed last week because of the whole baby worship thing, but we went back yesterday and had a highly amusing evening.

I remember my parents telling me how one of the biggest arguments they had was when they were decorating (stay with me, it's relevant, really). They were trying to wallpaper a room with pretty high ceilings and it required a huge amount of teamwork and patience. Well, apparently it ended in a huge row, with balls of wallpaper being chucked across the room and lots of shouting.

Dancing is a bit like decorating. You need to rely on the other person to do their thing, and you to do your thing and at the end it should all look nice. Patience and teamwork are key.

I'm actually pretty proud of me and Marek, we had a couple of moments of 'hang on, aren't I meant to be twirling you?' and 'ow, not that foot' but in general they are taking it easy on us and we could follow what was going on.

Others were not so fortunate. The whisperer was back, and this time she wasn't whispering. At one point her long-suffering partner was standing in front of her being berated for not doing it right and he just snapped and started showing her that he could do it, and look, I did use my left leg forward. I felt for him but it was really very funny. She kept getting at him, not even trying to keep the exasperation off her face, and he fought back, oblivious to the couples gliding around him, trying to stop themselves smiling at the silliness of it all.

Another couple got so fed up with banging into others that they just stood at the side and watched the others for the last dance or so, not talking to each other. I also saw one woman who gave her partner to one of the un-partnered women to have a go: she'd obviously had enough.

It all seems so ridiculous because it's supposed to be fun. We're all there to learn how to dance certain steps, so that we can dance together on fancy evenings out, or New Year, or whatever. The arguing lot seem to have forgotten this.

Beware the danger of dancing lessons, or decorating come to that.