STRANGE NOISES IN THE NIGHT

            I often sleep intermittently, and I was awake in the middle of Friday night when I heard strange noises in the little street outside.  It sounded like a heavy metal object being moved, and then voices talking.  I wondered who would be moving things at this hour of the night, hoped it wasn’t our car, but didn't get up to investigate.  Hubby slept on.

         

   When we got up on Saturday – rather late as it happened – we found a card from the police to say that in the night a car had crashed through our hedge and knocked over our fuel tank, and that we should get in contact with them.  Then people started arriving, and we weren’t even dressed.  First our house-painter, who had come along to clear our gutters of leaves – we’d expected him to come at some time but not necessarily then.  Then a neighbour, the father of the driver who had crashed – to apologize.

 Apparently his young son had already been out drinking once, then in the early hours, while his father slept, drove out again with a mate at what must have been great speed over a short distance, hit a car parked opposite us, and skidded into our hedge, demolishing our fuel tank and its brick supports!

Having dressed, we went out to inspect the damage, and the car in question was a real write-off, and had done quite a lot of damage to the other car on its way.  It had broken through a fence and hedge and pushed our tank off its base.  It is not, luckily, a tank that we use, but our predecessors did, and we had left it there as a back-up but had never had to call on it.  There was probably very little fuel left in it, but as there was the smell of fuel, apparently the fire brigade had been called out as well as the police and ambulance! 

I do not know if any other neighbours had gone out there at the time, or whose were the voices I had heard – one had been a woman’s.  The side door of the car was covered in blood, and the driver was now in hospital, with the family worrying about a possibly severed nerve in the arm.  The driver’s younger brother was now inspecting the wreckage, and it was a very salutary lesson for him later on about where drinking and driving can get you.

            

          I should have thought of photographing the car before it was towed away, but here, anyway, is a photo of our demolished fuel tank.

           

What is in my mind more and more is that if the tank had not been there the driver would have crashed straight into our house!  And into a room with a lot of breakables in it.  It makes you wonder if it would be better to leave it there as a bulwark against future events of this kind, although you don’t expect lightening to strike in the same place twice.  Yet we are going to have it removed as looks a mess.

          

          The police have not been to see us yet, and we've remained fairly calm about things.  Our house-painter said they couldn't have crashed into nicer people!  We sympathize with the father, who has to pick up the pieces, and is worried about the physical condition of his son.  He’s also lost his car, as it was his that the son took.  One dreads to think of the problems that family will face.

           The police ought to leave a few more wrecked cars standing around, so that young people and drinkers can see the physical results of a crash when one drives without being fully in command of a vehicle.  I have the impression that in the population as a whole people are much more responsible now when they go out partying about who is drinking or who driving, or whether everyone is going home in taxis.  But of course doing what is frowned on is part of the kicking-over-the-traces process of growing up, and one cannot expect reason always to win out.  Yet the result is that a number of people now have a lot of bother.

Recalling the Adult Ballet Summer School at Norfolk Dance

            At the end of January we can look forward to a whole day’s ballet workshop at Norfolk Dance in Norwich.  This will give us a chance to do a normal ballet class and then learn some real repertoire.  This is hugely exciting, and reflects in miniature the pattern of the 3-day summer school that adult ballet students are now able to follow each year here.  So, since ballet is an important part of my life and since I’d like to reassure other adults that studying it is still possible, I thought I would write about last year’s summer school.

  

          I’ve had the exhilarating experience of two such summer schools over the past two years.  Both years have presented us with a riveting combination of elements.  Each day began with class, as in any ballet organisation, and we were divided into the less experienced and the more experienced, I belonging to the former group as I’d only been learning ballet for 3 years, with no experience of having dipped into it as a child.

            In the previous year the more basic class was taught by one of my usual teachers, the gifted Nicky Gibbs, but the two teachers exchanged duties this time and we more rudimentary dancers were tutored by our artistic director Derek Purnell, who used to dance with the Royal Ballet.  It was an incredible privilege to be coached by him in a small group and benefit from his corrections and advice.  Despite our lowly level, he was very particular over such things as arm-positions, posture, using all the muscles in one’s feet, and straightening one’s knees.  Three of our members who normally attend classes in North Norfolk where they never receive any comments on their performance were startled but gratified by the amount of personal observation that was made to them so that they could progress.  It was very kind of someone of his artistic status to bother with our elementary level of learning, but Norfolk Dance, of which he is head, is concerned to bring dance to all possible areas of the community.

  

          The class was divided as normal into exercises at the barre and those in the centre of the studio, where we worked on our arabesques, arm movements, steps sequences, jumps and pirouettes.  The latter are what people tend to find particularly alarming, and Derek’s insights were invaluable into the importance of pulling up on tiptoe on the foot one is balancing on, keeping the other knee well turned out to the side to help propel one around, and not approaching the turn violently.  I have tended to throw myself into pirouettes, but when I tried rotating more slowly it strangely became easier.

            After the class we would learn some repertoire, one of the exciting features of the summer school.  The previous year, we had learned sections from Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet and The Firebird.  On the first morning this time Nicky Gibbs taught us Swanilda’s opening dance from Coppelia.  I told them that this was the first ballet I saw on the stage when I was ten (danced by Doreen Wells and Anton Dolin – I could never believe the later pictures I saw of him as an old man!) and afterwards at home I’d tried to reconstruct the steps of this opening dance in my back garden.  They replied that now was my chance to learn the real thing!  (But I must point out straight away that we didn’t dance on pointe during this summer school, and someone of my age is never likely to).  The dance concerns Swanilda’s attempts to get her neighbour Coppelia to acknowledge her greetings and invitations to dance, not knowing she is in fact a doll.  It includes a lot of mime & curtseying, but also leaps and pirouettes, to Delibes’ delightful music.

           The afternoon was dedicated to character-dance (or ‘national dance’).  After a session at the barre using character-steps (a lot of tapping and oblique movements), we learned the basic Mazurka step and then the Mazurka from Coppelia, a peasant version of the dance.  (The one in Swan Lake is more aristocratic).  Much stamping and twirling and cabrioles (clicking the heels as one jumps), and such things as jumping over one’s partner’s foot.  I’ve always enjoyed watching the character-dances from Coppelia, but my experience of it was somewhat poisoned by my feet being crippled by two hours in my stiff character-shoes.  I rarely wear shoes with heels these days anyway, & the leather was particularly unyielding.  The agony of being encased in them made it even more difficult to focus on trying to learn the steps.  These character-dances can be fast and furious, and I ended up with a sore and bruised big toe.  I’m just surprised that most of my toes recovered as soon as I returned to normal shoes.

   

         On the second day our teachers told us with evident relish that we were going to be chickens.  The rest of our ballets would be by Frederick Ashton, which Derek had had plenty of experience of dancing in, and we would start with La Fille Mal Gardée, a story which Ashton based on a lost 18^th century ballet about a farmer‘s daughter who finally manages to marry the boy of her choice rather than do what her mother wants.  Our section came at the start of this ballet, where a cockerel and his hens wake everyone after the night’s rest.  Apparently Ashton spent hours watching chickens’ movements before choreographing this humorous piece!  The birds jump down out of their coop and rouse themselves to activity, strutting and shaking their wings, until the dance becomes frenetic.  It greatly appealed to my sense of humour, and included a tricky sequence of jumps including entrechats.  The role of our cockerel was of course taken by our former Royal Ballet dancer.  I actually remembered this choreography rather better than at other times, and our teachers also thought we were picking things up really well.  As usual we had to perform at the end in the dreaded ‘small groups’ rather than all together, but one gets used to that.

           There were no photos taken during the summer school, as everyone involved would have had to agree in writing, and the administration was more than the office, run on a shoe-string, could have coped with.  So instead, here is a video clip of the Royal Ballet showing how the hen and cockerel number should be done, as we were taught in that tradition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiHLGigLPoY

            On the second afternoon we worked on the opening fairies’ sequence from Frederick Ashton’s The Dream, based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a ballet which Derek considered one of Ashton’s finest, and which I remember seeing on TV years ago with its original interpreters, Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley.  The music is by Mendelssohn.  It opens with Titania’s fairies flitting around the wood in various formations (and Derek had to tell us to be more ethereal and less like wasps in a bag!)  We worked as one whole corps de ballet in a pattern, doing different things among ourselves, such as arabesques and jumps in diverse directions.  It included another of those very fast jumps sequences that I find so hard to get my head around, and a certain amount of mime.  Ashton also likes an elegant use of the turning of the shoulders.  I still had a very sore toe from wearing the character-shoes the day before, and whenever I had to kneel down in The Dream it hurt.  However, amongst the majority of participants, t­­his seemed to be the most popular ballet we did.

   

         On the third morning our repertoire was very different: the Foxtrot from Ashton’s jazzy Façade to the accompaniment of Walton’s youthful music and Edith Sitwell’s crazy poetry.  I declined the invitation to wear character-shoes as my feet were still sore and instead wore soft early-dance shoes with small heels, although the heels proved unsuitable to go up onto in a tap-dance move.  This ballet has a lot of Charleston moves and kicking and general larking around.  It was my least favourite of the repertoire, but I recognize the value of studying very different styles of ballet.  It was meant to be a fun dance.  But most of us probably preferred the more balletic works.

  

          When we reassembled for our final afternoon to go through some of the work again, The Dream was not surprisingly the one with the most votes.  We had some worry about whether we’d remember what we’d done on previous days, but much of it came back with a few reminders.  Then we recapitulated Swanilda’s dance from Coppelia, which one person who’d been sick had missed the first time and was generally popular.  There was time for one more, and I was pleased that the chicken dance in La Fille Mal Gardée won out in the vote over the Mazurka, which I liked but its memory was tainted by my sore feet.  Derek expressed surprise that we’d picked up everything so quickly, and Nicky, our normal teacher, looked very pleased, not to say radiant, at how things had gone.  We finished with Nicky leading us through some wind-down Pilates stretches.  There will probably be another such 3-day summer school this year at the end of August.

            It had all been a great success, and we felt very privileged to have had this special experience and such good and detailed tuition in Norwich.  It must be one of the best provincial centres in the country in which adults can study ballet.  One meets such nice people on ballet courses, all of whom are fired by passion for the dance. 

Our new Spring Term has now started, and we look forward to making further advances.   Even though I’m only too aware that age has its drawbacks, I am determined to go as far as I can.  And we have the January Ballet Day to look forward to in a couple of weeks to give added spice.  In the last January session we learned some of Balanchine’s Serenade: I wonder what the repertoire will be this time?

On Carrying Weight Around

            The Slimming World organisation has two striking visual aids.  One is a parcel weighing 2 lb., which is quite heavy.  If you lost 2 lb. in a week, that might not sound very much, but it is awfully heavy if you hold it in your hands.

            The other visual aid is a parcel weighing 1 stone.  This is so heavy you almost can't lift it.  After much effort, I've now lost over 4 stone off my top weight.  When I think that for a long time I carried around the equivalent of four of those parcels strapped to my body, it almost blows my mind.

            I am very relieved to have got these 'parcels' away from my organs.  I happen to come from a line of long-lived females, and want to be fit in my old age.  To start with, weight loss was very slow, and it took me a long time to get down out of the 'obese' category, but, having done that, I slipped down fairly rapidly through the 'overweight' into the 'normal' category, and have now been on target for around 2 years. 

I had been too heavy for over 20 years, and now I feel decidedly fitter than I did 20 years ago.  It is like being given a second youth, and I feel I am living in magical times.  I cannot believe what now looks out of the mirror at me in the dance studio.  It's marvellous to have a waistline again!  And it gives a tremendous boost when so many people come up to me and comment, often incredulously, on the amount of weight I've lost.  And, no, I don't intend to disappear altogether.

Since reaching my weight target I have had the pleasure of winning various local Slimming World competitions, such as Woman of the Year in 2008 (very surprised when I was nominated) and Miss Slinky in 2009!  The latter competition is shown in the photo you see here - I went along in my ballet gear for fun.  Once I would never have imagined myself qualifying for this kind of sash, but my experience of losing weight eventually snowballed into wanting this title.

If anyone reading this is overweight, be assured that it's worth the slog to get rid of this millstone.  And you will do it with more chance of success in the company of a slimming organisation who will keep an eye on you and applaud even your minor successes.

Rather than carrying weight around, it's better to lift weights - even small ones - to increase bone density through exercise.

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Weight-Loss Creates A 66-year-old Ballet Student

It is marvellous in my retirement years to be able to engage in a new subject like ballet, which I started learning 3½ years ago at the age of 63.  I've loved watching it all my life, ever since I saw the Red Shoes film as a tiny child and then watched Doreen Wells and Anton Dolin dancing on stage in Coppelia.  But my mother could not afford to send me to dancing classes.  I also believed the commonly held myth that, if you haven't started ballet by the age of 7, it's too late.  Then, a few years ago, I discovered that Norfolk Dance holds classes for adult beginners, and as soon as I could get a place, I was in there.

     Yet before I did that, I’d had to do some preparatory work on myself.  During my career in a demanding sedentary job, there was little time for anything but work, and I became very overweight for a long time.  After retiring I was eager to develop new interests, and getting fit and losing weight were a high priority.  I did a lot of walking, and when a Sports Centre opened in my local village about 6 years ago, it gave a great boost to my aim, providing lots of helpful activity classes.  I was soon going 3 times a week or more to aerobics, Pilates and yoga.  This worked off the calories, made me more supple, and prepared the way for when adult ballet classes would appear on the horizon.

I tried to eat sensibly in this period, but was not getting on very well with weight loss on my own, so I had myself referred to a National Health dietician, under whose excellent guidance I lost 2 stones in 2 years.  I was still not at the kind of weight I wanted, however, and certainly not the shape, and I was starting to put on a bit of weight again, so I followed up a leaflet put through my door and joined Slimming World.

     This organisation meets once a week, weighs everyone and gives advice and support.  Its system of diet is very sensible, not forcing people to be forever counting calories, but recommending an emphasis on certain types of foods over others.  Some kinds of food can be eaten as much as one wants, but with others one must be more sparing, and some foods one should try to avoid altogether.  As with the dietician's advice, one tries to cut down as much as possible on fats and sugars - and pastry and ready-made dishes are major culprits here.  But Slimming World has good psychology and recognises that people need occasional treats; it is also non-judgmental and warmly applauds every minor success. 

Their system seems to work, and it is possible to lose at least a pound or half a pound a week with it.  I lost a further 2½ stone with them, making a total loss off my top weight of around 4 stone, and I have got a proper hourglass shape back.  The community of slimmers who attend these classes are of great support, and are very nice people with whom one wants to keep in contact.

     So, having lost a lot of weight and become very fit since retirement, I was in a better position to take advantage of the ballet classes I’d discovered.  It is an excellent way of keeping fit and developing confidence and good posture, as well as letting you follow out a lifelong interest in a practical way and maybe even indulge childhood fantasies.  And it is by far the most generation-mixing activity I've been involved in, for we have students ranging from in their teens and twenties through middle age to at least their sixties, representing every decade.  (And the tap-dancers seem to go on into their seventies).  And we are all passionate about it, and get on well.

     Ballet is difficult, but the problems are perhaps more mental than physical, as it is much more of a struggle than it used to be trying to remember sequences of steps.  But one does eventually progress, and while I'm clearly not going to make a career out of dancing at my age, I can still get a lot of satisfaction and sense of achievement from it.  From one class a week at first, I went on to do six a week at one point, but have now settled to a regular four a week as I've discovered more being put on and as I've gained in experience myself, able to attend classes at a variety of levels.  I find it very helpful to go to both beginners’ and more advanced classes, as there is a difference of focus in each.  Sometimes one wants to learn more detailed technique, and at other times one wants to be challenged more.

     As well as our regular classes, Norfolk Dance and the Theatre Royal, Norwich regularly arrange workshops for us with visiting ballet companies (Northern Ballet, Rambert Dance, the Richard Alston Dance Company and local choreographers), which have stretched us quite a lot.  In these we learn sections of current repertoire that is actually being performed on the stage by professional dancers.  There is also a 3-day ballet summer school each year where we learn a lot from total immersion in the art, with repertoire ranging from classical to modern, including character dance.  And from time to time there are study days on completely different forms of dance that I have been to, such as South Asian Dance, which add interesting strings to one’s bow.  In Norfolk I live in an adult dance student’s paradise!

Ballet term is beginning again just now after the Christmas break.  Normally an occasion for unalloyed joy, I’ve been troubled for more than two months by an ailment called ‘benign positional vertigo’ (dizziness and sickness) which has got in the way of some of the classes.  Twice recently I’ve had to sit out half the class when the dizziness has become too much.  Normally I’m very fit, so this is a great bugbear and I’m really fed up with it.  There doesn’t seem to be much that doctors can do about it, but I’m starting to try complementary medicine as it has gone on for too long already.  It’s uncertain whether it’s a virus, but if it is, it’s lasting a long time.  This is the current cloud over my paradise, but I hope we’ll be able to defeat it.  Arthritis hasn’t stopped me dancing, so I don’t intend that this should.

Anyway, having otherwise got my fitness back, defeated obesity and embarked on an absorbing skill, I feel inspired to urge others who would like to change their lifestyle for the better to do the same.  Less weight is more energizing and rejuvenating, and activity keeps you supple.  And the company of other people who share your passion is of great support.  Anyone can do it!  Why not give it a try?