This isn't a Dolly tribute

Tumble out of bed and I stumble to the kitchen, Pour myself a cup of ambition.
Oh Dolly. Should I write a long flowery tribute about how Dolly changed my life? It seems a bit late now and there have been massive outpourings which really do the job splendidly, and my life wasn’t really changed by Dolly except only for a few short days when I was maybe 10 years old. I found myself on stage (not somewhere I have frequented often) doing a ‘skit’ for a school show where me and a couple of friends danced to 9-to-5 with our hair tucked into headscarfs and old fashioned mops in our hands. Aged 10 we wouldn’t have known much about working 9-to-5 but it seemed like a jolly song to have a dance to. We thought cleaning was funny. (I don’t now, obviously, as I look regretfully at my un-mopped floor and cobwebbed windows.)

Remembering this Dolly moment did get me thinking a little bit, especially after having very recently re-watched Sliding Doors. (Gwenny with an incredibly strained English accent, John Hannah incredibly irritating with every line.) Back in the 80s I did a lot of dancing at school – in a relatively un-self-conscious and definitely not ambitious way. I just loved it. Stretching out (short! I was very small) limbs, our dance teacher clicking a rhythm through his teeth and fingers, our collective bodies clad in 1980s leotards and legwarmers, we’d choreograph routines and occasionally perform for an assembly or maybe even a parents-day. It was a very comfortable space. Somewhere I felt confident and possibly even something I could consider myself good at. In the classroom I wasn’t any of those things. So I danced. And at some point the dancing ended because when we all went up to senior school dancing wasn’t available (unless you did it out of school but that was difficult being at a boarding school, and it was ballet that was offered, not contemporary - which was what I loved, and who would take us anyway?). And whilst I was at a school which celebrated ‘the arts’ it seemed that back then, late 80s, dance wasn’t really included in this category. Not for children in a rural boarding school, anyway. So it fizzled out and my red-and-white leotard was pushed to the back of my drawers. And I lost touch with that little dancer and got into learning how to drink Bacardi and smoke cigs without being busted (which actually I did a good job of as I never was busted, I could confidently call myself extremely good at lurking in the shadows not being noticed by suspicious teachers).

My Sliding Doors thinking rewinds me to being that 11/12-year-old and being offered a life of dance… what would that have looked like? To have been encouraged and supported and allowed to be ambitious? It’s very likely I would’ve given up anyway in my mid-teens (according to research, girls are most likely to give up sports in their teens), but if dance had been there – taken seriously, pushed for, given value, would I have carried on? Could I have ‘made it’ – become a professional and stag-leaped my way around regional theatres with a small company, multiple pairs of legwarmers, poorly paid but loving life on the road?

In Sliding Doors Gwenny’s character discovers her shithead boyfriend in bed with another woman and so she dumps him, cuts her hair, starts a new company and aces at life, until she’s hit by a car and dies. The other Gwenny character doesn’t discover the boyfriends infidelity because she missed the tube and gets mugged and then wears plaits in her hair so we know which character is which. And when she is hit by the same van she doesn’t die but she’s learned about life in a different way and dumps her shithead boyfriend and pulls through stronger than ever. There’s a message there for us. (Don't cut your hair?)

My Sliding Doors scenario wouldn't be quite so dramatic and end in death. But I do wonder, especially when I get twitchy-body at the sound of certain tunes, what I could’ve been. I suppose we are all prone to thinking about what could’ve been and the aim is to not live with regret over past decisions or lack of choice, especially if we didn't even know they even existed, but to be the conductor of our own opportunities looking ahead.

Meanwhile my creaking and cracking 52 year old body actually is quietly pleased to not be flinging itself around a dance floor as I nurse a repetitive strain injury on one side (from watering the garden with bath-water during the drought, up and down stairs with a heavy watering can for weeks) and a bruised rotator cuff on the other side (I had a fall in December!). Each morning I wake up – I quite literally do tumble out of bed (Dolly didn’t even write this song during the menopause!) because overnight my joints have seized up like some rusty old bike left out overnight in the rain.

Talking of which (rain that is, not my rusty joints) how nice it is to see a cloud in the sky and a shoot of green grass poking through what had increasingly looked like a sheet of brown concrete but was actually the garden.