I went to a Zumba class for the first time last night. The fact I have now been to one probably marks the high point of Zumba's popularity (that and the fact that there was a piece about it on today's You and Yours), since the moment when I finally clocked the existence of The Spice Girls (in a feature in the Daily Telegraph) pretty much coincided with their zenith.
I've been meaning to go for a while. Through gardening and Pilates I am strong enough to lift one third of my own bodyweight reasonably safely, and fairly supple, and the last time I went for a walk with the Systems Administrator (admittedly that was last autumn) we covered 12 miles of Yorkshire moorland (not as vertiginous as the Lake District but by no means flat) on a day when I was going down with a virus (AKA a bad cold) and my muscles felt fine the next day, though the cold by the end of the week was atrocious. But I don't do much that raises my heart rate, or at least not in a good way (don't think parking tickets and encounters with plainly unreasonable customers count). I loathe running with a passion. Friends of mine go jogging and have done marathons and I honestly don't understand how they can bear to do it. It is boring, boring, boring, with the added spice of possibility that you might be hit by a car. But Zumba sounded more fun.
For anybody in the world who hasn't yet heard of Zumba, it is a series of strenous exercises derived from a fusion of Latin American dance and aerobics and done to music. I gave aerobics a wide swerve first time round, a fact which now makes me feel rather smug when I hear what damage it did to devotees' knees (so does running, you know), but I like dancing, and as I don't go to many parties where there is dancing and the Systems Administrator is a lifelong confirmed non-dancer, a class where I could jump about in time to music sounded quite acceptable.
Classes have been bobbing up all over north Essex, so I chose one in the hall of the next village up the road. The last time I was there I was talking to the WI about woodland conservation, and yesterday evening's demographic was rather different. However, while the majority were probably in the 18-25 age bracket there were a fair few oldsters, and some other people who hadn't been before. The instructor was a fearsomely athletic woman who demonstrated the moves (fairly briefly) standing on the stage, and then we all joined in, with varying degrees of grace and precision. Jumping about in time to the music turned out to be harder than I'd expected, in that my musical tastes, although broad, don't include any Latin American at all. The dance music I grew up with was predominantly based on four beats to the bar, often with a back beat, and the music for Zumba wasn't. As we one-two-three kicked, and jived our hands one way and then the other way, I found I had no intuitive sense at all of how long I was supposed to do one thing in one direction before switching to doing another thing in a different direction. But I thought the main thing was probably to keep moving, and not crash into anybody else. There again, one of the reasons I gave up with Tai Chi (apart from the fact that I started doing it because I hoped it would improve my posture and the state of my back, and my back took a step change for the worse while I was going to classes) was that I could never remember the sequence of moves. If I couldn't remember a set of a couple of dozen moves that were shown repeatedly to me every week then picking up a dozen different routines that were briefly demonstrated at great speed was probably going to take a while.
You get very hot doing Zumba, especially on a humid July evening, and you need to take a bottle of water, plus a small towel to mop your steaming brow. I didn't. The instructor, between whooping and exorting us to go for it, reiterated that we should take it at our own pace, do as much as we could, and not be afraid to sit numbers out. We had all filled in little health forms before we started (though with our names but not our addresses or phone numbers, so if I had dropped down with a heart attack they'd have had to take a punt on which of the people in the phone book with my fairly unusual name was me, or else work out which was my car and trace me via the DVLA, in order to summon my relatives to my bedside). I am afraid that some of the exhortations not to overdo it were probably directed at my scarlet face.
Afterwards I felt quite perky. I must have released an endorphin.
Addendum There has been a bit of media fuss recently about mislaid post, with newspaper stories about a postman who couldn't cope staching unopened letters at home, and cheering R4 stories about badly addressed mail being miraculously delivered. Neither has mentioned where a chunk of the missing mail goes, which is that it gets shoved through the wrong doors. We've had a car magazine clearly addressed to one of the neighbours (which I took round), a package for another one of the neighbours (ditto), a gardening magazine addressed to somebody with the same named house in one of the next villages (which I took round as well and had to ask in the post office where the house was. I hope she was grateful. I failed to receive an issue of a subscription magazine once myself, but nobody did the same for me). These are fairly and squarely the fault of the post office, either at the sorting office or on the part of the postie, but there are also the misaddressed ones. Last week we had a letter from Barclays Bank (it said so on the envelope) addressed to the trustees of somebody I'd never heard of, at a house with the same name as ours but an address in Earls Colne, which is the other side of Colchester, but then our full postcode, which is limited to around six houses on the farm here. I put that one back in the post box with a tart scribble not to redeliver it to us. We still get mail addressed to the people who used to live in our house nearly eighteen years after we moved in, and after many years of taking that round (they only moved three houses down the road) I did begin to feel that they should point out their new address more forcefully to their friends, relatives, and assorted clubs and societies.
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