Pan’s People

If you read the following, your reward is in the final two paragraphs. When I think about what happened last, all of the other words mean nothing. It's sequential but not truly connected.

Following the invitation of a local friend, I attended a dance aerobics class last night.

The class meets bi-weekly in a ballroom, where my friend attended a wedding as a child. Some fifty odd people were in attendance and the room was heaving. Bridal gowns and ceremonial suits had been replaced by an array of overfilled tracksuit bottoms. A brightly coloured sea of closely cut tops moved across the room and settled into a scattered distribution of gently bobbing waves. Glasses of champagne were offered on arrival. But that was just in my imagination. Instead, wealth was redistributed as we walked past a table, a cashbox and Maid Marian’s thieving fingers.

The babbling sound of gathering women filled the room. Then silence.

A perfectly toned, excessively bronzed man, climbed aboard his disco themed stage and we rose to our feet in worship. All hail ‘The King of Cheese'. The distorted cry of a permanently beached whale bled into the room and took the place of his every word. And in his wisdom, he wore tightly clad clothing, clenched his sinewy muscles, and where his clothing stopped, displayed a thin layer of richly marinated overcooked skin.

Our god for the night was in place. All hail ‘The King of Cheese'. A never-ending blast of hard thumping disco hits played relentlessly in his honour. A DVD of extreme sports glared brightly out, with images of surfers and people that can.

This was the world of dance aerobics and life in hyper drive. Disorientation came quickly and I experienced the confusion that semi-torturous sensory overload can inflict. The King of Cheese snorted a line of pure amphetamines. He was the God. He was the King and I was hoping. I was hoping that it wouldn't be too bad. I had already been banned from one aerobics class.

As the first beat of the drum machine pierced my eardrums and ricocheted off my heart, the disco diva charged resolutely into his chaotic routine. This is a routine known only by The King of Cheese, and by a few select girls that have been granted real-time access to his single-track mind. I blinked repeatedly and tried to focus. It did nothing. Every time that I came close to mastering the ability to synchronise a single limb with the patterns made on stage, the routine changed and I blinked again. I was at risk of losing it and reverting to silly and childishly unacceptable behaviour.

‘F&*f, Lor$f, oo~l, from the beginning, D*%g’

‘From the beginning’ was the only comprehensible instruction that The King of Cheese ever gave, and the distorted sound of caterwauling and feedback from his microphone headset seemed to resemble that phrase often. It seemed to be important and yet I had no notion of what it referred to. ‘From the beginning of what?’ I wanted to shout unintelligibly back. ‘F&*f, Kor£f beginning, J&*f?’ ‘Are you dying up there? Do you need help?’

In a lame attempt to catch up and rejoin the beat, I unwittingly tried to do two moves simultaneously, not really knowing what either of them entailed. With arms thrashing and legs akimbo, I nearly became entangled in my own limbs.

I had no idea what on earth I was supposed to be doing. My ungraceful flailing branches, no longer affably co-ordinated arms and legs, had become a potential weapon. The impending danger that I might wipe out a good proportion of the class in one dramatic ungainly move, loomed heavy in my mind. The instructor itched his leg and I copied him. It was my first, last and only successful act of repetition.

Grasping at straws, I stupidly took to the premature notion of ‘I can do this’, as the instructor began to jump up and down on a single chosen spot. I delighted in my ability to do the same. ‘Can’t we just do this for an hour?’ I thought. Truly, I felt quite pleased with myself for just being able to bounce into the air and land again. I was happy each time that the instructor returned to this activity; it gave me a feeling of accomplishment.

It was only when we’d jumped up and down for the fifth time - as the routine looped round in its haphazard fashion – that I realised that I wasn’t doing it properly at all. Any feeling of accomplishment was dead. The whale’s distress call was telling us to do something specific with our legs: in, out, up, down. I was never quite sure. I just threw them around, hoping that at some point my actions would be in synch with someone, somewhere - anywhere - in the world.

The hour ended and I made it through without maiming anyone or being sent home in disgrace. Hooray for me. I have a low embarrassment threshold so all was well in Planet Fabpants. As my friend and I were positioned at the front of the hall, I do wonder how many people tried to follow my lead, and what the fallout truly was.

I went to the gym today, and I could feel that the dance aerobics had left its mark on my body. I guess that the journey served its purpose and gave my muscles the workout that they need. That was yesterday and this is today:

The wind was so fierce, as I cycled home, that spray from the sea spat at me from some 350 feet away. Minutes later, as I put away my trusty old stead, I noticed that some sea foam had blown inland and settled by our garden shed. The bubbles sat in a condensed ball and lay at rest on our pebbly path. They had travelled way up high, and climbed over a row of imposing five or six storey homes. 1000 feet or so away from home they looked relaxed. They deserved a break. We all deserved a break.

I poked at them with my finger, just to test if they were real.