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.

My Five Favourite Dance Performances

Tobias Mead in Britain's Got Talent 2010:



Benji Schwimmer and Heidi Groskreutz' stunning West Coast Swing. A study in interpretation:



Some of these moves were taken from their 2001 performance. I still can not see what they are doing with their arms at 1:55:



This is the group routine of "Five Guys Named Moe" from "So you think you can dance" season 4. The versions on youtube are of very poor quality and Fox tries to hinder every leak. Right now, downloading the film here seems to be the only option:

Look out, brother Eat Moe!

Similarly, footage of Mark Kanemura's performance to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" at the audition for that season is excessively hard to come by. The closest we get is this link.

Mark Kanemura seeing a little silhouetto of a man

Squash

I went squashing on Sunday with Lady B and Sir Bob Niceandeasy. Originally Lady B was going to join us both, we'd just take it in turn playing against each other. However, following the purchase of some rather tight high waist trousers, Lady B has become rather self conscious with regard to the dimensions of her lovely backside. Thus, she chose to molest one of those horrid treadmills which makes you seasick instead, leaving me and Sir Bob to it as it were.

Previously, I and Lady B had practiced for several sessions, and I had had my ass handed to me repeatedly in this capacity. However, to family and friends I have consistently claimed to have won with the counterproductive effect that no one really trusts my representation of the outcome of such battles. Imagine my despair, then, when I went on to beat Sir Bob 5 games to 1 (bearing in mind that the blighter was Lady B's Nestor and revered idol of le monde de squash)!

Sir Bob, having put up stiff resistance and showed admittedly superior skill, found diving for the ball less appealing and indeed physically defensible than I did, high as I was on adrenaline and fear of losing. In a nerve racking final set we went head to head, although not literally, at 10-10. I succeeded in placing two sneaky, hard ones above the lower line, the kind of strikes that makes enemies. However, Sir Bob, being of a humorous and easy-going nature took his loss with a smile and was seemingly more than happy to escape the wretched den.

Despite threatening to denounce my claim to fame as fraudulent, he, as the sportsman he is, lamented his loss to an incredulous Lady B. However, it seems to be untrue that sportsmen get all the girls; the evening was spent showing off with Lady B preferring to retreat into the world of three prostitutes and their mom in New York (that is, the infamous HBO product "Gaining carnal knowledge in the urban areas")