Strictly Come Prancing

Tags

Ann Widdecombe, Brassica, Dan Snow, dressage, DVT, hanging baskets, husband, Kirstie Allsopp, Madonna, Moscow, NHS, OAP, Olympics, pelargonia, riot, St Kilda, teaching, Tiger Feet

Thursday

I went out with Brassica to buy some reduced pelargonia for my rotting hanging baskets. A crowd of orange lycra clad OAPs were showing off in the local garden centre café.  They should have been extras in the Opening Ceremony Tiger Feet number. They’d probably arrived by car and parked their bikes at the entrance for pure effect.  Nothing worse than the elderly behaving badly, I said to myself. They just propel themselves to the nearest sylvan cheapeatery to save on winter fuel in the coming seasons, which saves their annual allowance for luxuries such as ostentatious cycling equipment.  Mind you, they probably prevent DVT by squeezing themselves into such tight gear, so may be saving the taxpayer on NHS expenses.

I enjoyed the elegance of the Strictly Come Prancing dressage.  The winning horse, whose name was a bit like Viagra, could have shown Widdi a thing or two about dancing.  And she couldn’t have complained about the decency of what both horse and rider were wearing.

Madonna isn’t being very restrained in Moscow. Supposedly she had been asked there to sing.  A deputy minister told her to remove her cross and to put on some knickers, which wasn’t a bad idea.   She seemed to have inspired some girls in Leeds to lipstick the strapline: Moralising Slut over their boobs. It all seems rather adolescent and, as a teacher, I could have told them that the best thing to do with juvenile protest was to ignore it.

A poor athlete heard his leg snap during a race but carried on out of a misplaced sense of duty. I have always believed that one’s joints have a finite amount of wear or tread on them and so long ago I decided never to overstretch them.  My husband is a chief exponent of the theory too.

It is almost a year to the day since the London riots and several youths have been sent down for their part in the destruction. Dan Snow had been passing when some looters had run out of a shop, bearing trove.  Big Dan had tackled one and made a citizen’s arrest.  If it had been a female, I can guarantee that she wouldn’t have struggled too much. Dan could have taken wrongdoers to St Kilda for re-hab and could have introduced them to a fitness programme that included running up that chimney gully, or he could have made them harvest gannets, enduring fulmar spittle, as they abseiled down vertical cliffs.  Even worse, Kirstie Allsopp could have redesigned their psyches by forcing them to crotchet drag nets. Or Putin could have offered them judo training in Siberia.

© Candia Dixon Stuart and Candiacomesclean.wordpress.com, 2012

Princess Syndrome

Tags

Andy Murray, Ben Ainslie, Brassica, kids, Lynne Truss, Olympics, Suttonford, teaching, Victoria Pendleton

On looking in the mirror, parse that Lynne Truss, I spotted a roll of flab like a swimming lane demarcator. However, the minute I left the house to exercise, I was caught in a shower.  I met my friend and we sprinted up to Costamuchamoulah for a very skinny latte with surface-sprinkled coffee granules, which might have been 24 carat gold dust, judging by the price, and we practised the high jump by leaping onto high bar stools.  Lots of toddlers were running around wearing medals which they probably had won for screaming. I knew what I would like to have given them.

I was relieved when they were carried into 4x4s which had windscreens bearing the legend:  Keep your Distance!  World class mini-athletes on board.  Personally I always have to stifle the urge to drive into the back of such vehicles, as if I am on the dodgems.  Anyway, they can rest easy.  I would definitely obey the injunction.

I told my friend, Brassica, about a study that I had heard being discussed which showed that if you over-praised kids for scribbling and framed their every effort and gave them the mini-equivalent of a Turner Prize, in the form of a Kinder egg every time they covered the wallpaper with wax crayon , you would destroy their ability to discern what was truly laudable and what was, frankly, average.  I complained about all the yummy mummies who had confided to me that their children were in the running for the Nobel Prize for Literature, simply because at prep school they had written little sagas about flopsy bunnies. Once serious issues had to be studied at secondary school, the poor little mites were having nightmares because a fictional puppy keeled over.  If I had agreed to censor all upsetting episodes from the classics on the syllabus, in order to protect their precious sensitivities, I would have had to present them with blank pages, simulating their parents’ tabulae rasa, or tabulas rasa- oh, whatever!

Andy’s mum would not have presented him with his Playstation, just because his racquet had made contact with the ball, when he was fourteen and three quarters.  On the other hand, she probably had not encouraged him to waste much time on books either. Or girlfriends.

We discussed whether Kate Middleton’s mum had had a windscreen sticker which announced: At least one princess on board. Why should anyone take more care when bumper-tailing and slamming on of brakes, consequently ejecting an embryonic celebrity from a gilded carrycot, than when tailgating a beaten up old banger with a sticker that reads: Disreputable old bag of a moaning mother-in-law on board?

Surely we are all equal in the sight of the gods?

With some annoying old biddies on board, though, you might invite an impact worthy of a meteoric crater the size of the Olympic stadium, so maybe better to play it safe if you carry such passengers.

Good old Ben Ainslie had voluntarily gone round a marker buoy again, when challenged, even though he knew he had been right, which shows that his parents hadn’t put any special stickers on their windscreens, or treated him as Prince Ben.

Victoria Pendleton accepted that she had made an overtaking mistake in the heat of the moment and she had not made a fuss, nor challenged the decision by whining that she had been momentarily distracted by a fit bloke in the velodrome. She said that there were good and bad days and she simply progressed to the next challenge.

Bully for her, I thought.  That is the true Olympic spirit.