Dancing

Lucy’s column for July 22.
Dancelo…1
It’s difficult describing to your nine-year-old granddaughter the intricacies of the Gay Gordons and the Eightsome Reel, and the great gusto with which this granny danced them on the lawns, fields and playgrounds of her childhood, when Grace has spent the past month or so practising to perfection a 50s style jazzy-jive Jools Holland number before making her debut on the Assembly rooms, Derby, stage.
My reminiscences were all but dismissed with one of those waves of the hand which spell "Get a life, gran" or, worse still, "What-e-verr…..". She’s not that rude, but you get the drift. And she was slightly more impressed to learn that I went on to bop many a Saturday night away at the Pavilion, Matlock Bath, and that it was my generation, and not her teacher, Rhiannon Jones, or her daughter Catherine – a professional dance student, who taught them the steps - who invented the hand-jive.
But this was Derby’s dancing divas sixty years on, and I was privileged to be in the Assembly Rooms audience last week when the Derby City School Sport Partnerships presented a celebration of dance 2008. Although "privileged" was furthest from my mind when I turned up, as requested, at 9.30 am – to discover that out of the 28 schools taking part, Our Grace’s, Mickleover Primary, was number 27 on the programme.
I confess a groan escaped as I anticipated three hours of nerdy music, clod-hopping routines, screeching kids, and performing prima donnas, and thought of that basket of ironing, and great clumps of weeding, I could be doing back home.
But even the little lad sitting behind, and kicking seven bells out of my seat with such determination and intensity that even a polite complaint to his parents from the women in the adjoining seats, let alone one of my looks, could not quell, failed to mar the sheer joy of that wonderful morning.
Hip-hop and be-bop, bhangra and Bollywood, boogie and ballet – oh what a lot of talented and diverse dancers and dance styles we have in our Derby schools. There were cheerleaders with their pom-poms, little poppets in space suits strutting their stuff to David Bowie, street dancers, break dancers, and tiny tots cavorting to Pop Goes the Weasel and Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush.
The event incorporated children from reception class to Sixth Form, and the versatility of the programme, and putting it all together in one great, glorious, colourful show, is a credit to their teachers and all those who took part front or back stage.
It was heartening to learn that the Government has invested some £5-million in dance in schools. It sure beats PE and rounders as a form of exercise, and is far more appealing to the majority of children. I was well impressed. Gay Gordon? Eat your heart out!
End
Tealo..1
Oh dear. Regular reader and the man I regarded as an ally in all things old fashioned and traditional, George Wride, writes that he is "saddened, disappointed, and feel let down" to learn I no longer use loose tea. It seems that my ritual of pot-warming, mashing, brewing, milk-in-first, is no longer good enough because there are state-of-the-art tea-bags lurking at the bottom of my tea-pot, where there should be tea-leaves. George, of Hollies Road, Allestree, reckons that in keeping with my penchant for the past, traditional tea-making would have been an essential in the Orgill household.
It is, he says, one aspect of the past that will never die in the Wride household. And he wounds even deeper by signing off : Yours, with betrayed trust. Dear George, don’t desert me, I need all the readers I can get. If this heralds the end of our special relationship, just let me say, I hope your down-pipe never clogs! end