When I was a ten year old child I wanted to be a backing dancer to the singers who performed on Saturday Night TV.

I was mesmerized by the way they flung themselves around the singer on stage, in their understated costumes, often having some direct interaction with the singer at the end of the song – holding them aloft or grasping at their legs (I think! – my memory is a bit sketchy on that one!)

I must have said, I wanted to be a dancer, because I know that my dad said, dancing was for sissy’s.

I have never had dancing lessons, I am in my fifties now, but I have rhythm  – I know that I had potential as an innate fact, but I lacked opportunity, I lacked courage, and I lacked belief.

I was driving home from work recently in silence, as I do, so that I can hear my inner voice and this thought came into my head, that if I had a second life, I would be a dancer – I’d train to be a ballet dancer.

As it happens, I have no concept of a re-birth, but what I do know is that my first life, my first chance is still going, I live, I am, I can be.

I smiled to myself, when I reflected that often, I say to my wife, when we are sat watching the TV in our night wear, “hey, look at them legs” (sorry reader – I am referring here to my own legs, although hers are nice too!).

I stretch out my leg to reveal the well formed muscle down the calf, stretch the foot outward and the big toe upward – It looks like a ballet leg.

Sometimes, when I am stood in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, I swing my leg backwards and forwards, holding the leg outward in front of me with heel turned up and foot and toe extended – it looks to me like a ballet pose.

These actions speak to me of at least trying to connect with what is, even at a basic level, at least I try to connect to what is.

I know that it is perhaps a tad too late to play the Prince, in Swan Lake, but it is not too late for me to experience ballet steps.

My next blog will be: Intensity

William Defoe