With my mind on my money and my money on my mind
Those of you who have seen my rapper team's Facebook updates will already know the punchline to this story: we had to pull out of the competition at the weekend.
A couple of weeks ago, Katie turned up to practice with some bad news. Charlie, her husband's best friend since the 70s, had been found dead. He'd lived alone, on a boat in Limehouse basin, and had been found one Sunday lunchtime floating in the water.
We all knew Charlie. When Mabel danced in London, Charlie often came along to watch. I've spent a lot of time, over the years, talking rubbish with him in pubs. A week or so later, we knew that his funeral would be last Friday. Katie bravely said she'd drive up to Leeds for the competition early on Saturday morning.
Then another plan emerged. A group of close friends and family were planning an extended wake on the Saturday. And Mabel said: off you go, Katie. There'll be another DERT next year[*].
A combination of Caribbean cruises and cruciate ligament injuries meant we were on bare minimum numbers this year. Without Katie, we didn't have enough people. We briefly considered: could we co-opt Very New Mabel and still go for it? Very New Mabel is, after all, a transfer from another team, she's already a dancer. And reluctantly we said no, we couldn't. We haven't beaten our dances or our style into her yet. VNM agreed that she'd sooner not dance than dance badly, but she'd take Katie's ticket to come along and watch.
Our new strategy ran as follows: put on our fabulous new team hoodies and team t-shirts, plonk ourselves down in poll position in the nicest of the competition pubs, and set on to provide the other teams with a raucous audience. The most elusive category in the competition marks is "buzz", the nebulous measure of the excitement a team can create. And creating buzz in an empty pub is hard.
We identified the nicest pub (Sally spent a lot of time Googling and reading reviews. I took the short cut and got the same answer by asking maviscruet). Mr Foley's Cask Ale House (eight hand pumps, six real ciders, half price prosecco on Fridays, I may move in). And we said: Mabel are in the building. We will cheer for you. But we will cheer an awful lot louder if you have bought us gin[**] first.
And we basically spent five or so hours being extremely geeky about rapper. And being bought drinks by rather more teams than I thought would go for it. Special mention to Rockingham Rapper, who turned up with a tray containing G&Ts for all seven of us, and to Hawksword who thoughtfully included a couple of bags of crisps as well. Northgate, in their own unique way, observed we already had quite a lot of ice, lemons and tonic left and just brought over a single glass containing several measures of gin. We compiled our own ordered list for each of the competition classes (which I have yet to compare with the actual results), spied out new moves we'd like to steal, and picked apart performances once the teams were out of earshot.
And then we walked to a different pub to be geeky about the traditional competition, and then walked to the evening venue (the fabulous but acoustically-weird Left Bank) to watch everyone dance all over again. Fortunately, it was quite late on in the evening before I discovered that one of the extremely cheap cask beers had ginger in it.
On Saturday morning, seeing stressed rapper dancers everywhere, we were kind of glad we weren't competing. (Admittedly, most of us would have both drunk less and gone to bed earlier on Friday night if we had been ;) Saturday was fun... but not as much fun as it would have been if we'd been dancing. Sitting in a pub all day is quite surprisingly hard work.
Like any small niche-interest convention, DERT is a strange, strange event, doubtless impenetrable to outsiders[***]. It's strange to dance at, because the audience will applaud the difficult bits, not the obviously flashy bits. You put the tricky reverse spin in your dance because those watching will know you've reversed it and be impressed. You can turn to the person next to you and say "they've got the chicken wings and everything" or "they couldn't hold that speed through Rank" and know that they will understand you. And no one will ever say "but what's the big deal, it's just a dance competition".
And you can also be sure that - thanks to the joyful return of the extraordinarily insane Danish rapper team Red Mum - for the next week or two, everyone will smile if they see a Danish flag.
Sunday dawned bright and fabulously warm and sunny in Leeds. As people began to drift away at lunchtime (many of them to go and sit in a pub and talk some more about rapper, and compare raised eyebrows over some of the scores) I took myself off to maviscruet's, having been lured by the promise of a Sunday roast and boardgames. I can now attest that Mavis cooks a damn fine roast, with extreme serenity and panache.
The addition of a couple of locals (who came bearing bread-and-butter pudding) gave us enough people for games, and we played our way through Las Vegas (accidentally inventing the word bellendery on the way), Timeline (ordering things by invention date is more fun than you think), three games of Forbidden Island (a co-op which we managed to win each time, even the final game where we played by the actual rules rather than the ones we'd misread) and Braggart. All new to me, but chosen to be "not too thinky" for a Sunday afternoon.
Which I have to say was all jolly civilised, and a lovely way to finish off a weekend away, so many thanks to Mavis for allowing me to invite myself round.
[*] Despite worries, there will. In Bristol. No date yet.
[**] Mabel have a team policy of drinking gin. Which is a bit of a shame, because I don't really like it much. But the two criteria for entry to the team are: do you like gin? and do you like cake? VNM has a special dispensation as she's teetotal; she has to eat twice as much cake.
[***] My favourite joke from a Tommy all weekend: "This is our squire, Bob. Can he Fixy? Yes, he can!"
A couple of weeks ago, Katie turned up to practice with some bad news. Charlie, her husband's best friend since the 70s, had been found dead. He'd lived alone, on a boat in Limehouse basin, and had been found one Sunday lunchtime floating in the water.
We all knew Charlie. When Mabel danced in London, Charlie often came along to watch. I've spent a lot of time, over the years, talking rubbish with him in pubs. A week or so later, we knew that his funeral would be last Friday. Katie bravely said she'd drive up to Leeds for the competition early on Saturday morning.
Then another plan emerged. A group of close friends and family were planning an extended wake on the Saturday. And Mabel said: off you go, Katie. There'll be another DERT next year[*].
A combination of Caribbean cruises and cruciate ligament injuries meant we were on bare minimum numbers this year. Without Katie, we didn't have enough people. We briefly considered: could we co-opt Very New Mabel and still go for it? Very New Mabel is, after all, a transfer from another team, she's already a dancer. And reluctantly we said no, we couldn't. We haven't beaten our dances or our style into her yet. VNM agreed that she'd sooner not dance than dance badly, but she'd take Katie's ticket to come along and watch.
Our new strategy ran as follows: put on our fabulous new team hoodies and team t-shirts, plonk ourselves down in poll position in the nicest of the competition pubs, and set on to provide the other teams with a raucous audience. The most elusive category in the competition marks is "buzz", the nebulous measure of the excitement a team can create. And creating buzz in an empty pub is hard.
We identified the nicest pub (Sally spent a lot of time Googling and reading reviews. I took the short cut and got the same answer by asking maviscruet). Mr Foley's Cask Ale House (eight hand pumps, six real ciders, half price prosecco on Fridays, I may move in). And we said: Mabel are in the building. We will cheer for you. But we will cheer an awful lot louder if you have bought us gin[**] first.
And we basically spent five or so hours being extremely geeky about rapper. And being bought drinks by rather more teams than I thought would go for it. Special mention to Rockingham Rapper, who turned up with a tray containing G&Ts for all seven of us, and to Hawksword who thoughtfully included a couple of bags of crisps as well. Northgate, in their own unique way, observed we already had quite a lot of ice, lemons and tonic left and just brought over a single glass containing several measures of gin. We compiled our own ordered list for each of the competition classes (which I have yet to compare with the actual results), spied out new moves we'd like to steal, and picked apart performances once the teams were out of earshot.
And then we walked to a different pub to be geeky about the traditional competition, and then walked to the evening venue (the fabulous but acoustically-weird Left Bank) to watch everyone dance all over again. Fortunately, it was quite late on in the evening before I discovered that one of the extremely cheap cask beers had ginger in it.
On Saturday morning, seeing stressed rapper dancers everywhere, we were kind of glad we weren't competing. (Admittedly, most of us would have both drunk less and gone to bed earlier on Friday night if we had been ;) Saturday was fun... but not as much fun as it would have been if we'd been dancing. Sitting in a pub all day is quite surprisingly hard work.
Like any small niche-interest convention, DERT is a strange, strange event, doubtless impenetrable to outsiders[***]. It's strange to dance at, because the audience will applaud the difficult bits, not the obviously flashy bits. You put the tricky reverse spin in your dance because those watching will know you've reversed it and be impressed. You can turn to the person next to you and say "they've got the chicken wings and everything" or "they couldn't hold that speed through Rank" and know that they will understand you. And no one will ever say "but what's the big deal, it's just a dance competition".
And you can also be sure that - thanks to the joyful return of the extraordinarily insane Danish rapper team Red Mum - for the next week or two, everyone will smile if they see a Danish flag.
Sunday dawned bright and fabulously warm and sunny in Leeds. As people began to drift away at lunchtime (many of them to go and sit in a pub and talk some more about rapper, and compare raised eyebrows over some of the scores) I took myself off to maviscruet's, having been lured by the promise of a Sunday roast and boardgames. I can now attest that Mavis cooks a damn fine roast, with extreme serenity and panache.
The addition of a couple of locals (who came bearing bread-and-butter pudding) gave us enough people for games, and we played our way through Las Vegas (accidentally inventing the word bellendery on the way), Timeline (ordering things by invention date is more fun than you think), three games of Forbidden Island (a co-op which we managed to win each time, even the final game where we played by the actual rules rather than the ones we'd misread) and Braggart. All new to me, but chosen to be "not too thinky" for a Sunday afternoon.
Which I have to say was all jolly civilised, and a lovely way to finish off a weekend away, so many thanks to Mavis for allowing me to invite myself round.
[*] Despite worries, there will. In Bristol. No date yet.
[**] Mabel have a team policy of drinking gin. Which is a bit of a shame, because I don't really like it much. But the two criteria for entry to the team are: do you like gin? and do you like cake? VNM has a special dispensation as she's teetotal; she has to eat twice as much cake.
[***] My favourite joke from a Tommy all weekend: "This is our squire, Bob. Can he Fixy? Yes, he can!"