Aerobics and Cardigans

Seeing as my first post were, rather strangely, on the subject of squash it is equally strangely fitting that the first post on the blog's one year anniversary should be on sports.

After endless hours at work, I was commuting home by train the other day. My fellow travellers and I were alone and palely loitering, bent double like old beggars under sacks and only the yet to be subdued endeavoured to look out the window as the train slowed down for a sharp turn. What we saw was eerily uncanny.

There was a room with large windows at some considerable distance. Despite this we were able to see a group of about 60 persons, all female, clad in unflatteringly tight and gaudily coloured sportswear. They were erratically stomping from side to side and throwing their arms about with wild, fantastic and feral abandon. Contrasted with the abject and monochrome state in which we found ourselves in our carriage this would seem merely unsettling if it had not been for the fact that they were all doing it in perfect unison. Clearly, there was method to the madness, a method I had been somehow aware of but had chosen to repress. I was reminded of a stanza from The Cardigans' Godspell and the words stuck with me for the rest of the day.

You can hear it in the beat they march to

And you can feel the earth shake when they start to dance

You can tell by the way they move you

It's not murder, it's an act of faith.