Being home from university for a month means I’m more susceptible to my mother’s suggestions for ‘activities’ we can do together. I need to remember that this is a women, who bought 20 motion-detector frog alarms from Poundland last week and hid them around the house, in a fit of lulz.
So I accepted her invitation to a Zumba class, on the understanding that it was a fun activity, where I would lose several stone immediately, whilst eating cake (admittedly I might have zoned out at some point but my understanding was that this was a FUN WHOLESOME ACTIVITY). Imagining it to be like Pulp’s ‘The Common People’ music video was probably my first mistake, although immediately spotting a group of women wearing Justin Bieber t-shirts and rave whistles immediately disillusioned me of my optimistic predictions.
I was wary, since upon entering the room, I was treated with the same level of suspicion Arthur Kipps received from the villagers upon arriving at Eel Marsh House, as the super skinny lycra-clad yummy mummies cast their beady eyes upon me, wondering if I would be responsible for the death of their first born. Alternatively, they felt threatened by my very swagger into the room, making it clear I was here to win the perma-tanned teacher’s approval, forever relegating them to the back of the class.
It started badly and ended catastrophically, as I began to realise the amount of balance and co-ordination I possess makes a baby lamb look like the next obvious member of Diversity. We were instructed to lunge left and right, it’s not an over-exaggeration that I have ‘recovering from a debilitating disease 80-year old’ hips. I can no more gracefully move across the floor then I can speak Swahili.
The two moves I found I could identify with were ‘Serve a Drink!’ and ‘Give it Attitude’, although I usually find myself doing these in conjunction at the student union, with eyeliner and hairspray AHOY and I’m usually so drunk that I demand Beyoncé is played all night, not sober in a dance studio.
Attending with my mother meant that I immediately saw where I got my immense lack of co-ordination and balance from, as she proceeded to canter like a horse for an hour, regardless of what torture move we were meant to be displaying…”Do the Guantanamo” was an utterance I expected to be barked any minute, instead a series of increasingly incomprehensible instructions were given, resulting in my own canter, as I realised that was all I could do. I don’t shimmy, I definitely don’t hip thrust and my hips DO LIE. They are serious politican-esque hips who lie about EVERYTHING and made me believe I could do Zumba.
