Strictly.

Strictly’s finished and Abby Clancy is a goddess but what’s in there to learn? Well I for one am a lumpen flaccid automaton devoid of elegance, and with the dress sense of a pigeon. I live in a world where my brain orders movement as if my body is a waiter serving pottage. My protestant work ethic has reduced it to the mechanics of doing. I’m a bird tethered in a guinea pig wheel trudging ever on to’rd a dangling seed. Like a Dodo I watch Strictly and somewhere deep inside I seem to remember that I can fly. Not elegance prescribed by some android etiquette but the elegance of responding to air, to my natural substance. Under my pigeon grey I see exotic plumage, a rainbow fan of glittering feathers as I beam at the memory I can’t recall. And the shapes and tactility of genders writ large, female grace to male strength, feminine strength to masculine fragility, in a flurry of twirls and lifts. Limbs moving to the elegance of wings, necks to the grace of swans and hips to the beat of eons, all held in the long lost memory of our bodies. How have we been reduced to this plod? And the contestants reawakened beam and stroke, kiss and hold and tingle, not for the scores but the gift, not for the graft but the opportunity given. An opportunity within our own gift should we have the courage to take it. This isn’t ballroom; this is Strictly, strictly as in the demands of something necessary to avoid the flabby trudge along the passage of time.