Sue Gaisford will not be cowed by her daughter's derision at her moves...
 Sue Gaisford |
We were sitting idly in the kitchen, my oldest daughter and I, drinking tea, when she said it. She regretted it immediately, the minute she saw my face, but it was too late. What she'd said, with a kind of barely controlled giggle, was "I'm sorry Mum, but we just didn't know whether to laugh or cry."
She might just have put the final tin lid on a lifetime's frustration.
I used to like dancing. I'm a bit too young to have rocked around the clock with Bill Haley, but I know for sure that when I was at school I was pretty damn good at doing the twist. And I remember marching down the street arm-in-arm with a load of friends singing - or shouting, really - "Doo wah diddy, diddy dum diddy doo!" It felt so good.
And it got better. At student hops, I'd stamp and shout and spin and strut with the best of them, all of us modelling ourselves on the scornfully magnificent arrogance of Mick Jagger, never for a second imagining that we looked anything other than frighteningly sexy and irresistibly alluring. God we were So Cool.
But not long after those halcyon days, something went wrong and I suffered a failure of nerve. I think it might have coincided with having children. Of course that is no coincidence. I guess the oldest was about two when she started to laugh at my dancing. From the moment of birth she has known more about everything than either of her parents so I shouldn't have been surprised. I should have just ignored her and danced on, oblivious to her derision. It might have shut her up. But she was joined by several little sisters who all, clearly, thought the same. I stopped dancing.
Instead, I took them to dancing classes and watched. I was never one of those ferocious ballet mothers hissing 'Other foot Araminta!' from the touchline but I got them the leotards and the tutus and the crossover cardigans and I sewed pink elastic onto their shoes and drove them half across the country to their exams. By the time the fourth daughter did her Grade 1, I knew quite a bit about it all, in theory.
Then their ballet teacher started a morning class for grown-ups and, foolishly, I joined. It was no fun at all; Araminta's bony mother was there, with many of her closest, daintiest friends, all of them always knowing which was the right foot. I felt like a labrador surrounded by whippets. But I persevered. I went twice. The second time I launched into a joyous pirouette with more enthusiasm than control and crashed to the ground. I laughed nervously, so as not to cry. Nobody else even smiled.
So I packed in that kind of dancing too. Since then, it's been only the occasional highland fling (which is enormous fun and exactly right kind of thing for the labrador type) and, if I'm lucky, a barn dance or two. So I was really excited when my oldest two daughters suggested that I went along with them to a 'body conditioning' class at the gym, which involved lots of organised jumping about to the likes of Abba and grand old sixties greats.
 It could be Sue |
I never really noticed that my girls tended to move away from me when it began. It never even occurred to me that I looked unusually amusing. After all, this is not one of those scary urban lycra-and-sweatband gyms: it's down a lane and through a farmyard and one or two of its clients were grown-ups before I was born.
But now I know. My daughters aren't, they assure me, at all ashamed of me: it's just that when I'm dancing, apparently, I'm...well. I'm hilarious.
Damn it, I'm not giving up. My son is in Spain at the moment. He's mad about flamenco and particularly a wonderfully sinuous and elegant dance called the Sevillana. He can do it and I'm going to get him to teach me. And then I'll go to Spain too, and I'll drink Rioja and dance all through the warm summer nights encouraged by the vociferous and powerfully appreciative enthusiasm of anyone who cares to join in..
And no daughters will be allowed near the place.
