Dancing (or things I'm really bad at Part Two)

When I was four years old my mother enrolled me in a local ballet class.

Three weeks later I dis-enrolled.

This was a wise choice for everybody involved and I haven't looked back since, but it always disappointed my mother who I think had hoped to live through me. Not for any great length of time and not in a way that would affect the quality of my life or turn her into one of those warped stage mothers but just a little sojourn into living through her daughter - something shorter than a childhood but longer than three weeks. Once a keen ballerina herself she had been told aged twelve that her 'loud knees' were just 'too faulty' to continue, and assuming that I had inherited my father silent stealth-joints she thought I should give ballet my best shot.

My best shot was dreadful. It ricochetted off the walls wounding other children, I'm speaking metaphorically here but I might as well be speaking literally. It was apparent even before the first session ended that raising my arms, positioning my feet in different directions, and bending without toppling over were all activities beyond my modest ken. It was really quite perverse of me to stick at it as long as I did.

In many ways my lack of skill was a blessing in disguise as it turns out I didn't inherit my fathers click-free joints and now (even at the moderately spry age of twenty-one) am basically a human-version of one of those Noise-Makers that people whirl around at football matches. I can't move without clicking. If I draw a circle in the air with my hand my wrist sounds like a cement mixer, and my neck (which I crack often and violently in order to dissuade people on public transport from sitting next to me) makes a noise akin to someone breaking a bundle of stiff twigs in half. If I were to do ballet now it would sound as if I had castanets hidden about my person. What a stroke of luck, then, that I couldn't do it.  It would have been galling to have discovered a genuine talent and then suffered the same knee-based fate as my mother. In all likelihood it would also have left a dreadful legacy as I, in turn, forced my daughter into ballet in the hopes that she could live the dream, only to discover that she in turn was entirely comprised of click and would have to press her own daughter into it... who would also be clicky. And the horrible cycle would continue ad infinitum, each Savory woman marrying not for love but for the supple qualities of her husbands click-less knees in the hopes of breeding out what would come to be known as "The Curse".

Anyway, joints aside, the point of all this is I can't dance and I should have realised this aged four rather than aged eighteen when, surrounded by gyrating, hair-flicking strangers on my first and last night of clubbing, I attempted a sort of bear-like shuffle and noticed that they were politely averting their eyes.

"So you dance like an arse" my friends said "Just get drunk. You are too self-aware that's all".

They were wrong.

I can get fantastically drunk, completely separate my mind from my body, and at no point does it imbue me with the ability to dance. It is not a matter of inhibition it's a matter of skill.

"Just listen to the music and move with the rhythm" recommended hateful well-wishers. This is equally useless. It's like saying "just put your lips together and blow". It sounds simple, but it only makes sense if you can already whistle. If you don't know how to whistle and you actually put your lips together and blow you just spray spit everywhere through your closed lips.

My dancing is very much the choreographic equivalent of spraying spit everywhere through your closed lips.

I really can't do it. Not only can I not do it but I actually don't like doing it. If I could do it, I wouldn't. Ever. This general aversion is probably the reason it took me so long to discover the full extent of the problem. There was a fourteen year gap between ballet and clubbing and I spent the entire time refusing to dance.

We had dance classes at my school but, fortunately for me, they never involved anything that you could actually call dancing. Other schools taught their students to waltz or cha-cha, but not us. Looking back this may have been due to what I can only describe as 'the fervent anti-lesbianism measures' put in place by the leather-clad Head. On arriving she observed that a small number of us, out of either natural propensity or possibly boredom, were having relationships with each other and decided that the best way to deal with this (rather than just letting it happen) was to impose a series of sanctions on that famous homosexuality inducing subject - Performing Arts. We were not allowed to put on plays that included romantic plots (think about it - that is most plays) because of the drag and subtle girl-on-girl undercurrents so it stands to reason that they wouldn't have wanted us slow dancing with each other either. Eventually The Head just banned drama and dance outright, but for the first few years that she was there the school opted out of traditional dance and replaced it with something more akin to half an hour of creative flailing.

For your flailing lessons you needed no rhythm or syncopation but you did need that sort of unabashed gusto and cheerful disregard for looking like a tit that comes so naturally to self-aware pubescent girls. You didn't need a partner (who you might accidentally start to find attractive) either. Creative flailing was an entirely solo pursuit. Sometimes you might be asked to band together with five or so other flailers and all flail around each other. But not often.

At the start of each lesson we would assemble surly and poe-faced around the edge of a mobile that smelt strongly and unpleasantly of our own feet, and after a few dreadful stretches set to whatever song was popular at the time, our 'dance' teacher would give us a sort of brief. This was usually a situation like "marooned in the tropics" but sometimes it was just a noun like "cat" or "tree". We would picture these things, and then we would 'dance them'.

I think they were hoping that we would lose ourselves in this enchanted world of imagination, and give completely free rein to our natural flailing instincts. Whirling off around the room like acid-eating dirvishes lost in our colourful minds and completely at one with our expressive abilities.

This never happened. Well, at least not to me.

On one occasion our dance teacher, (who was actually a P.E teacher and clearly considered the lesson more than her jobs worth) bought in a C.D of the sound track to War of the Worlds and gave us a more detailed brief...

"I've brought some music in and I have choreographed some dances for you. You can take one of two roles..."

She took us through the roles, and the dances. I say dances, it still wasn't dance, not really, it was something like mime but with more repetitious stepping...

"Pretend the aliens are coming and you are working your regular jobs. Perhaps you are an office worker, in which case you do two steps forward, type on your imaginary computer, two steps back, turn, drink your imaginary tea. Housewives, two steps forward, peg out your imaginary washing, two steps back, pretend to chat to the other housewives. When the music changes register that is when you see the crafts hoving into view, ok? And then I want you to do two steps forward, FEAR, two steps back...."

I remember opting out of the office worker or housewife scheme. Instead for the duration of the War of the Worlds I 'danced' a role of my own creation - Gravedigger. Two steps forward. Dig an imaginary grave. Two steps back. Dig a second imaginary grave positioned two steps behind the first one. Two steps forward... and so on. When the 'crafts hoved into view' rather than pointing or crouching dramatically like my classmates I leaned on my grave diggin' spade and had a contemplative cigarette, watching the saucers with the Stoic calm of a man who knows that this invasion will ultimately be very good for business.

It is testament to how little our 'dance' teacher cared that she never once asked what I was doing. Maybe she thought I was giving free rein to my natural flailing instincts. In a way I suppose I was. My natural instincts were anti-flail and the gravedigger was a very still and thoughtful character, his flailing kept to a bare minimum at all times. He became a sort of vehicle through which I subtly expressed my hatred for the indignity that is dance.

The thing about actually hating dancing though (as well as being crap at it), is that it makes me a bit inhuman (just a bit). Dancing, like eating and hugs, is something people are hard-wired to enjoy. All cultures dance. It's one of those things. It is, also, a sort of social shorthand for 'everything is great'. So far in life my no dance policy is going quite well but I am very aware that there is every possibility I might get my self into a situation in which I am socially obliged to dance in order to show my happiness/approbation/joy/what have you and if I don't I will be implying that "everything isn't great" which will look quite rude. Other peoples weddings is a good example of one of these situations. My own wedding is a better example.

I've got that one sorted now though. I think for my first dance I'm just going to reprise the gravedigger role. If I've married the right man (ie. married him for love rather than for his knees) he will go along with it or, better, mime a corpse. Me in white with my imaginary cigarette staring stoically at the sky and him prostrated and motionless at my feet. Both of us together as the guests look on. Beautifully still. Expressing our perfectly static love with a jubilant, celebratory lack of movement.

Terminally Unemployable

A month ago (against my better judgement) I graduated from university. Life since then, rather than being the blur of champagne and cakes that I envisaged, has been an endless procession of people, some of whom I hardly know, asking me questions that are, at once, vague and horribly all-encompassing. The kind of things that, in any other circumstance you simply wouldn’t be able to lead with in polite conversation...

“So” they say “what exactly are you going to do with that life of yours?” 

and 

“Will there be a job? Or will you just be a burden to family and state from here on in?”

I generally try to spit, subtly, at these people but perhaps I wouldn’t be so thorny if I could present them with an actual plan. The fact is I have nothing sensible or realistic to tell them. I haven’t seriously aspired towards any sort of job for about seven years, and I will tell you for why.

When I was in year nine my entire class took an online aptitude test that provided you with a list of all the possible professions (I do mean all of them, French Horn Polisher was an option) and ranked them in terms of suitability based on your answers to a series of questions. These professions were marked with either a green tick (for those jobs that would bring you great happiness and advancement) an orange circle (for the ones you weren’t suited to but could basically muddle along in without anyone noticing) or a red cross (for those jobs you should never under any circumstances enter in to, ever). Unlike the majority of people who second-guessed and calculated their way through the exercise, wanting to be reassured that whatever profession it was that they had their eye on was indeed the one their personality marked them out for, I answered the aptitude questions with complete honesty. 

For my efforts the computer rewarded me with a long list of red. 

I had one orange (Snake Milker, no really, which seemed unviable.) 

It was sobering.

A lot of people were unhappy with what the computer had determined was their ideal career, and sat long faced for the remainder of the PSHE lesson ruminating on their grey futures in poultry wrangling or the professional horn polishing business, but I didn’t even have that to look forward to. At my most open and honest, and with what was surely the most comprehensive list of professions ever compiled to choose from, I had been deemed terminally unemployable. Sure, I could struggle through with the snake milking but I would always know that I was only hanging in there by the skin of my teeth. The other snake milkees, the ones that had got a green tick next to Snake Milker, the ones for whom The Milking was a calling that had ‘chosen them’, would look down on me, and rightly so. 

This all stuck in the craw to such an extent that I basically gave up on aspirations and decided to dedicate what remained of my life to reading. It was working well until a few months ago when my mother pointed out (forcefully) that this was never going to make me any money, and my sister had to sit me down and make me work out exactly what it was I wanted to do. “Satire?” I said after a while this was dismissed as about as viable as the snake milking “Give me a break, Jonathan Swift” my sister said “what did you want to do before you became a posturing and delicate soul?”

I can’t remember exactly when I became a posturing and delicate soul, as I think it was quite a gradual process but I can remember incredibly clearly all the jobs I wanted to have before actually having a job was a possibility. As a child I was very clear cut about my (at that point, distant) future (it would be a concerning joyless child who wasn’t, really, “What do you want to be when you grow up Timmy?” “Oh...pfftt....something in an office?”)From the ages of four to eight professional acrobatics was my sole aim. My parents had already prepped me for the role by naming me Anna.

Anna the Acrobat!

Alliteration, I had observed, was the key to the profession. As long as the name caught on my lack of coordination and general dudities would be overlooked. 

I could just see it.... 

Anna The Acrobat - wrought in bright colours on posters peeling from dry-cleaners windows. Anna The Acrobat - for one night only! Watch her walk the high wire using only her own massive head as a ballast! Marvel at her feats of daring-do and pause only briefly to allow her some quiet time with her inhaler between acts!

I have no idea where all this came from, as far as I can remember I never saw any particularly inspiring acrobatic displays as a child, I don’t even remember going to a circus. The notion just arrived fully formed in my soft child-head one day “acrobatics - that’s the thing for me”. My parents, ever supportive, installed a trapeze, hand-crafted by my father above my bed, and I practised each night with the sort of fervent self-disapline that has been entirely missing from my life ever since. If only I hadn’t expended it all on that damn trapeze, maybe I would actually have a real job by now.

Anyway, in spite of this initially fervour at age eight acrobatics was left in the dust as I slowly progressed through the dictionary of professions to acting. I was to play Belle in my infant schools production of Beauty and the Beast, opposite James, a flamboyant boy that teachers had decorated so that he resembled a gigantic horned slug. My beast.

Because the role was far too sustained for any one eight year old to tackle singlehandedly they split it between three of us. Other, less talented girls played Belle in the first and third act when she was either flacidly underdeveloped and innocent, or flaccidly developed and rightous, I on the other hand played her in the second, when, captured by slug-James, she went from pure provincal virgin, to Stockholm Syndrome sufferer, to committed lover. To my mind it ranked highly in the list of most complex roles in the western dramatic cannon.

I don’t want to sound boastful but it was staggeringly well received. People threw roses and the such like, asked for my signature, copied my hair cut. I was a hit. The amusingly named Mrs Badger took my parents to one side and suggested that they take me out of main stream education and enrole me in drama school. I knew they would because they had been so supportive with the acrobatics dream and it would be inconsistent of them not to be behind me in this - my true calling. 

When they didn’t take their youngest daughter out of school at the age of eight and sentence her to a life of child-acting with all its attendant mental trauma, I started a long campaign of hate against them, pointedly sulking and not speaking to them for days in a way that I hoped would highlight my natural propensity for drama. Looking back I’m really not sure they noticed. Desolate and seeking comfort I turned to television (I still do this, by the way) and spent long evenings watching the Real Actors. Hating them. With that hard knotted hate that only children are really capable of. Fortunately after a while this subsided, but I kept on with the television watching and, in time, repeated exposure to Rolf Harris, who would leer grotesquely over dead or dying animals every evening at 6.30, suggested a new career path.

Along with every other nine year old in the county I spent the next three years discovering to my horror that you didn’t just become a vet. You couldn’t stride into your local practice and begin magically healing animals like St Francis of Assissi until someone decided to pay you for your trouble. Instead the preparation for the role involved really quite offensive amounts of science and by age twelve, realising that even small amounts of science offended me, I called it a day on vetinary surgery. From then on I floated about, fixing on various professions for short periods of time until year nine, when, as we know, all professions (bah one) were entirely ruled out.

Usually I like to tie up these blog entries in some way, but I still don't have a job, so I can't. I want to say that one computer run simulation doesn't genuinely dictate what jobs you can do, I think that is probably true, but I have no proof of it. I haven't been an acrobat, or an actor, or a vet, or a glass eye maker (that was on the cards for a bit) or a satirist even. I've been an Avon Lady for two hours but they fired me before it began. So far in life all the evidence points to the computer aptitude test being right on the money. I am terminally unemployable.

So I'm going to conclude, desolately, with an image.

Heres to the future...

(You were imaging real milk, weren't you!)

She actually looks quite expert, I wouldn't be that good, that snake would have become tangled in my hair by now, or I would have broken the glass or the snake by holding them too tightly.

Seriously though, if anyone needs a satirist, do let me know.

Funferalls

When I was in my late teens, with an eery synchronicity, a huge number of my relatives suddenly and extravagantly died. It’s a period of my life that I like to refer to as “The Death Jamboree” and the upshot of it (besides the free buffets and sparkling company) was that it afforded frequent opportunities for me to observe the terrible disparity between the way in which my family behaved at funerals, and those standards of taste and decorum set by the rest of civilised humanity. Other people, I noted with rising discomfort, managed to muddle through these things with either a dignified grief, or a heartfelt and honest sadness. My family, as a collective, tended to opt out of these traditional approaches favouring instead an odd brand of levity. This wasn’t the “Wear bright clothes. Don’t be sad. Celebrate my life” brand of funereal levity, popular among primary school teachers and the chronically bubbly, but something ultimately more ghoulish, a sort of sinister glee and propensity for puncturing the solemn with, sometimes unintentional, but almost always intentional, irreverencies. It was chronic, on both sides. Which is unusual. 

My mothers family is often charitably termed ‘the normal side’ by onlookers and well-wishers. This is really only an exercise in comparison, and taken as an isolated case you would be hard pressed to accurately apply the term to any of them. To their credit though they do at least attempt to enter into situations with the requisite seriousness that tradition dictates. My maternal grandmothers funeral kicked off "The Death Jamboree" and the combined efforts of my mother and uncle meant that, for the most part, it was a normal, dignified affair, during which what my mother termed “the Savory’s folly” was kept comfortably at bay.

Things started drifting about mid-way through, though, when my cousin, during one of the many interminable ‘vicar monologues’, leaned over to me and whispered...

“Oh, fuck...”

I assumed this was a reflection on the monologue, but he followed it with... 

“...I’ve left my phone on.”

I shrugged dismissively, “Ah, doesn’t matter, John, no one will notice.”

“No, no, you don’t understand...” he said, increasingly frenzied “Oh God! My ring tone - it’s The Poddington Peas.”

There was a pause as we both envisaged it, trilling it’s bouncy way though the service... 

‘Down at the bottom of the garden, among the birds and the bees, a little lot of little pea-ple, they call the Poddington Peas! The Poddington Peas!’ 

(If you aren’t familiar with the Poddington Peas and want to get the full effect of this anecdote, give the theme a little youtube search, it’s very rewarding.) 

...“Turn it off, then.” I hissed.

“No, no! I can’t! It plays a shorter snatch of the Poddington Peas when I turn it off,”

“What?”

“And on, and also... also when I get a text.”

I sat frozen for a while, reeling from the news that he had apparently completely Poddington Pimped his phone. He spent the remainder of the service with his hand hovering over his pocket and fear in his eyes. In spite of the narrative pull to the contrary however, he managed to leave the crematorium without treating everyone to a nostalgic blast of 80s children's television, but the very notion that he might have done effectively broke our collective concentration. Now that the idea of pea-based hilarity had been introduced, everything that followed instantly became less than serious. From the vicar's assertion that our grandmother was “at the high table with God and all the saints” (“All of history’s most holy and canonised, and one 92 year old woman from Sevenoaks?”) to the scattering of her ashes during which the same hyperbolic vicar, standing atop my grandfathers grave proclaimed...

“We will now scatter Dorothy’s ashes from this censor in the shape of the holy cross”

A small compartment in the bottom of his ash-scattering censor opened, but rather than running gently out and tracing said shape, the entirety of the ashes just slumped into a heavy grey heap which the vicar tentatively shoved into something marginally more cross like.

“Ah, the holy cross.” he said optimistically.

Nothing had ever been further from a cross and closer to a shapeless mound. Sidelong glances were exchanged. At the reception afterwards we got no end of kicks from pointing to piled plates of sandwiches and saying “Ah, I see someone has artfully arranged these sandwiches into the shape of the holy cross” or wandering up the garden with pieces of funereal battenburg cake and remarking “John! How did you manage to craft Dorothy’s compost heap into that attractive holy cross shape? I think that is a really nice touch.”

The trend, having been set, was only intensified at the funerals which followed. My great aunt’s took place in an unknown church somewhere near Portsmouth, and having driven to three wrong churches and been forced to stop when we saw a roadside stand that sold Caramac bars ("Look! Caramacs! Never mind Great Aunt Joyce! You just can't get those in the shops these days! Pull over so I can stock up.") we arrived, ten minutes late, screeching alongside the procession with our car doors flung open and people trying to clamber out long before we came to an actual halt. 

There was this.

And then there was the music. 

In spite of some loose Cockney ancestry I would maintain that Chaz and Dave’s “Rabbit, Rabbit” is a baffling choice for anyones funeral, unless that person is either Chaz, Dave, or perhaps some kind of disturbed Lapophile.

This sort of thing was as nothing however compared to the funerals that were to come on my fathers side. The side that even the most charitable onlooker could never describe as normal, comprised of people who even on a festive, non-somber occasion were already batting at an above-average rate in terms of the sinister yet hilarious. The side in which people made pets of tame jackdaws, and divined the weather from the texture of their garden toad’s skins. The side in which people cultivated mouse skull collections, communicated solely in Vivian Stanshall quotes, and, keeping all their prescription drugs in one massive carrier bag, simply took a lucky dip each morning. The Savorys.

“I think it’s only fair to tell you," said my father, replacing the phone in its holder and turning to my sister and me "Uncle Steve will be using the words ‘cat penis’ in the eulogy. So... forewarned is forearmed.”

As it was I’m really not sure whether it was better to have been forewarned about the content of my Grandfather eulogy, on the plus side I didn’t explode when my Uncle spent a paragraph of it talking about cat’s penises, but on the other hand I did spend the length of the funeral itself wondering how exactly he was going to manage it. “Maybe he will just open the eulogy by yelling “CAT PENIS”" my sister speculated "Maybe he will just throw it in among lots of sincere stuff - 'Robert was a kind, honest - cat penis - loving man.' - you know, just to see if anyone notices."

In actual fact the cat penis was part of a much larger penis anecdote detailing my Grandfather's concern that passing shoppers in Asda might mistake the "bright red" and "unusual angled" cat penis that my Grandmother was describing, for his own. They were looking at him, apparently, in a disgusted yet intrigued way that suggested that this was the case. 

If you think this is an odd thing to bring up in somebody's eulogy then you are right, but the entire thing was like that. Little hilarious, but probably inappropriate, snapshots. Like the fact that my great grandmother, already scandalised by her daughter dating an Englishman and a protestant, spent the first year of their courtship genuinely believing that her future son in law was named "Bob Satan" or the additional fact that, in spite of years of being corrected, she never really stopped calling him this. The vicar slapped my uncle on the back after the ceremony and told him it was the funniest eulogy he had heard. This is ostensibly a compliment, but does serve to demonstrate gap between "Savory's Folly" and the rest of the world. Eulogies aren't meant to be funny, or at least, not primarily funny. Normally, when attempting to sum up somebody's life, you simply wouldn't mention the fact that a group of strangers once garnered a false impression of their penis. That sort of thing - it's just not done.

Another thing that is popularly not done is to lead your family in a bouncy song of your own design the lyrics to which are, simply "Granddad is dead! We buuuuurned him!" as you drive home from the crematorium, but then my father always was the foremost proponent of "Savory's Folly". His plans for his own funeral were testament to this. He was to be stuffed and placed at the entrance to where ever we held the thing. Attendants would be encouraged to shake his hand in a final gesture of friendship and then, if they cared to, drape their coats over his outstretched arm. When everything was over, he wanted us to keep any coats that people had left on him, and to place him "sensitively but still strikingly" under the glass of a coffee table, which we would then be free to use at our leisure - a ghoulish, but suitable gleeful family heirloom.

I'd never really given my own funeral all that much serious thought, at least, not since becoming aware that I have a family reputation for the ridiculous to uphold, but having had the time it took to write this to reflect, I now have a pretty clear idea of how it is all going to be. I think I would like, just for that one day, to broaden the experience of "Savory's Folly' to my guests more generally. 

I can be stuffed, or unstuffed, depending on how much they value the cleanliness of their coats, though I will need to be de-coated and en-coffined in good time so that they can lower me in to the ground to the Poddington Peas theme. My sister can conduct the eulogy; a call and response affair in which she will yell “CAT...” and the congregation will yell back “...PENISES” four or five times. 

"Anna is dead." the announcement in the local paper will read "We burnt her. Her mortal remains were deposited at the edge of her Uncles favorite Caramac stand in nr. Portsmouth, heaped into the shape of the holy cross."

Note it down, blog readers, I will be holding you to it - posthumously.