Because she would be leaving the country, I thought it was best to get another date in quickly so I asked if she was up to anything the following day. She said she was going line dancing and asked me if I’d like to join her and I said yes right away because that’s what spontaneous people do. It was only once she’d left the car and I had driven away that I realised that tomorrow was Valentine’s Day.
Line Dancing
I was not allowed use of the car the following day and so I had to ask my younger brother Stephen to give me a lift to line dancing. On the way I received a text from my date telling me she would no longer be able to attend because her mum had thrown her a surprise Valentine’s Day party, an excuse that I believed at the time, but don’t worry, I am now fully aware that I got well and truly swerved. Even though she’d cancelled on me I didn’t want to turn round and go home because I had already got myself into the line dancing headspace and I was really looking forward to giving it a go. When I told Stephen this he did the nicest thing he could’ve done in that situation and offered to accompany me to line dancing instead. I think it’s only right that at this point we all take a moment to admire Stephen and what a superb brother he is. He could’ve cut and run, he could’ve just taken me home and left it at that, maybe used his evening with the car to go and do something that he wanted to do, but he didn’t, he committed himself to an evening of dancing in formation to music he didn’t even remotely enjoy while someone barked orders at him through a PA system just because his brother had gotten majorly swerved without realising it. What a guy!
The line dancing class was held in a hall in some sort of community centre. Everything was beige and tan. We entered the room and received puzzled stares from the other members of the class, mainly because we were the only people there under the age of fifty. Most of our classmates were in their seventies, all of them were women and none of them were expecting us in the slightest. The leader of the line dancing class was a lady called Dee. I know this because she was wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Dee’s Devils’. A few of the other ladies were also wearing Dee’s Devils T-shirts and some of them had plastic devil horns on their head. Once they’d established we hadn’t walked into the wrong room by mistake, they welcomed us to the group and the class began.
First things first, line dancing is stupendous. Steve and I both had a lot of fun. Whenever we were asked to turn to the right or step to the left my brother would slap his thigh like a cowboy and it was funny every single time. Dee was zinging me throughout the night but I didn’t even care. At one point someone spilt some water near me and she accused me of wetting myself and everyone laughed at me but I was just as on-board with the joke as anyone else and laughed louder than anyone else. (Or maybe in my head I did. Actually, it may have taken me a while to figure out what she meant by ‘you could’ve waited,’ but I definitely laughed at her joke and suppressed my instinct to defend myself by pointing out that if anyone was going to wet themselves at line dancing, it would be one of the many pensioners in attendance, pensioners who would never laugh at incontinence if it happened to one of their own but absolutely lap it up when the shoe’s on the other foot. For shame.)
I am also aware that at this stage in the book it’s starting to sound like my social circle mainly consisted of the elderly. The porcelain exhibition, line dancing, painting their kitchens, jumping out of planes to raise money for them – I hadn’t realised until writing this book that immediately after the car crash and getting confronted with my own mortality I did suddenly end up gravitating more towards the aged. Maybe I was subconsciously facing my fears head on? Staring death in the face instead of hiding from it? But I was just the sort of teenager who preferred/loved activities usually reserved for people well into their retirement.
At the end of our class Dee said, ‘Great work everyone, time for the professionals now, feel free to stay and watch if you want to see some quality line dancing!’
Even though this was a massive kick in the collective guts of the group, it was intriguing enough to make Stephen and I want to stay behind and watch the professionals at work. The professionals, it turned out, were all around the same age as we were, all of them were women and they were all exceptional line dancers. I thought I’d picked up line dancing surprisingly easily until I saw them move at speeds I could only dream of and not one of them laughed when the person next to them slapped their thigh for a joke. (Mainly because no one did slap their thigh for a joke. I have since learnt that slapping your thigh for a joke is frowned upon within the world of professional line dancing.)
Once their class was over, four of the line dancers came over and started to talk to us (with their mother, but still). They asked us how long we’d been line dancing for, how we were enjoying it so far, whether we’d come back next week. They offered to teach Stephen some new moves and took him by the hand over to the dance floor. (From what I could tell they were teaching him Michael Jackson dance moves but I’m not certain. Does Michael Jackson count as line dancing?) Their mum stayed with me and carried on chatting. We talked about dancing and her son who was a professional dancer named Hypno. Hypno would often begin his routines in the foetal position and then pop and lock his way out of an imaginary womb, as if he were being born. I looked over at Stephen who was being taught a dance move where you look like you’re pushing your own body parts around with your hand, and thought, Considering I got cancelled on tonight, this has actually worked out pretty well. Four ladies our age are hanging out with us and we’re having fun. I could feel my ego healing itself. Then the mother pointed at Stephen and asked me, ‘So how long have you been together?’
On the way home I thought it best not to tell Stephen that the ladies who’d been paying him so much attention didn’t really fancy either one of us and they actually thought we were a sweet couple going line dancing together for Valentine’s. He’d had a good night and there was no need to take that away from him just yet. I did tell him the very next morning and he took it rather well. If anything, learning the truth helped him make sense of the previous evening and why we had suddenly become babe magnets. Sometimes it’s nice to confirm that the world is exactly as you thought it was and your role in it remains entirely the same.
Karaoke
When I got home from line dancing, it occurred to me that I had spent two nights in a row doing things that were outside of my comfort zone so I decided to try and maintain that for a week because I was bored and I had enjoyed line dancing far more than I thought I was going to and also because I was going to be dead one day.
The next day I went online and searched, ‘Things to do on a Wednesday night in Kettering’ – the internet gave me nothing. This is typical. Things happen to you when you’re not looking for them and as soon as you try to make them happen again you can’t. The only thing that came up after a lot of delving was a karaoke night in a village nearby. This would definitely be a new experience for me as I had avoided singing in public, especially at karaoke nights, pretty much all my life. I had not sung in public since ‘La La La Humpty’ and before that I had bailed on my solo in the St Andrew’s Primary School production of The Woodcutter and the Christmas Dove. I had clearly been very nervous about singing as a child and then when I finally did sing in front of my class in secondary school, I was made to do it over and over again until it wasn’t fun any more. This is the reason why I avoided singing in Pindrop and we ended up with a singer who may or may not have been a double agent working for another band who’d sent him on a mission to sabotage us at every turn. It was time to put all that behind me though; I couldn’t be scared any more. Maybe I’d freeze up, maybe I’d be so good they’d make me come back every week to perform for them until I retired on stage. Regardless of the outcome it felt important to try.
At the time I could think of nothing I’d prefer less than singing karaoke in public but if I didn’t give it a go then this new project of mine would be over before it’d even begun. And so I drove to the pub in question completel
y alone. I hadn’t invited anyone to come with me because I didn’t want any of my friends to see me singing but as soon as I arrived at the pub and saw people singing karaoke in front of their mates I realised that singing alone with no support whatsoever in front of a room of judgmental strangers who weren’t obligated to get behind me with cheers of encouragement was actually worse. I really, really did not want to do it and what’s more nobody was forcing me to in the slightest – just me and the rules I had set myself for no reason. Despite all of this, I still approached the guy in charge and put my name down on the list. The song I chose to sing in front of a pub full of strangers was ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ by The Police. I think singing a song like that when you’ve turned up on your own and no one is cheering you on is actually sadder than singing a Smiths song or some other depressing number. Tragic, in fact. Merrily singing about a woman who lights up your life and makes everything worth it, while quite clearly on my own with no one standing beside me is as bleak as it gets. Let’s face it, ‘Everything she do just turns me on’ is an uncomfortable line to sing in front of strangers who all feel extreme pity for you.
After putting my name on the list, I sat at the bar with a lemonade looking petrified and waiting for them to call my name, going over the lyrics in my head. An hour later I approached the karaoke host again.
‘It was too busy so we had to take your name out,’ he said. ‘If anyone pulls out we’ll put you on.’
So I sat down and waited again. The thing that shocked me was that he said it was too busy and yet every time one of his mates walked through the door he got them straight on, hugging them and patting them on the back while thrusting the mic into their hands, and some of them didn’t even want to sing!
I felt a mixture of frustration, anger, relief and boredom. I stuck around until an old boy in a flat cap sang ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ to his dancing wife, everyone clapping along, and then I decided it was time to go. I didn’t have a back-up tune and this guy had a reasonable voice, so there was no way I was going to follow him with the same song and butcher it while no one danced or clapped along with me. I could’ve asked his wife to keep dancing for the James Acaster version but she seemed out of breath after his rendition and anyway it wouldn’t have meant the same coming from me. It was eleven p.m. when I left the pub and way too late to find something else to do, so I just went home.
I had immediately failed my own challenge. But despite the fact I had fallen at the first hurdle, I still decided to keep on with it and see how many nights out of seven I could do something new on. Also, maybe going to a bar and attending a karaoke night on your own while crapping yourself because you’re expecting to sing a song at any minute also counts as a new experience? I had never even got that far before when it came to singing karaoke. For the first time I had got myself into the right mindset – I was ready to sing in front of a room full of strangers. If I managed to do something different on the other six nights of the week, I could surely allow this as a small victory too. Anyway, it was my challenge so that meant I got to decide the rules.
Board Games
I already knew what I was doing on Thursday night because I had found it when searching ‘Things to do on a Wednesday night in Kettering’ the previous evening. The Kettering Board Games Club met at the Mind Centre every Thursday. It started at seven p.m. and you had to bring a board game with you – those were the only details the Kettering Board Games Club web page had to offer. So I phoned my friend Wardy (the sign thief) and he agreed to come along as well, because why not?
I brought a board game called Thrice with me. Thrice is a ‘simple game of tactics’ where you roll three or four die and then leapfrog them over one another as if they were counters on a board, and if you jump over your opponent’s dice I believe that means something, maybe you win, I’m not sure. All I knew was I couldn’t bring Monopoly or something obvious like that (this was the Kettering Board Games Club, mainstream games would not be welcome), but I also couldn’t bring anything too obscure because then I’d look like I was trying too hard. This ‘simple game of tactics’ was perfect for the Kettering Board Games Club. It would show that I was smart but not arrogant and that I didn’t follow the masses but I also avoided pretension. We knocked on the door of the Mind Centre, Thrice in my backpack, and the door was answered by a bearded man in a Star Trek T-shirt (I know that sounds clichéd but it’s what happened). He looked at us, perplexed.
‘We’re here for the board games club!’ I said. He looked shocked, literally reacting like no one had ever turned up to Kettering Board Games Club before. Like it had only ever been him, sitting in a room, week after week, hand frozen in a ‘flick’ position and poised above a spinner, waiting for someone to walk in and challenge him to a game of Articulate.
‘Oh, OK, cool, come on up,’ he said, having composed himself. We followed him upstairs and into the room where the games took place and it’s fair to say I wasn’t fully prepared for what awaited me.
I was not, and still am not, familiar with games such as Dungeons & Dragons or Warhammer, but that’s what they were playing. There was a game that looked like D&D but was actually called something like Hero Quest being played by two guys on one table, a game that seemed to just involve cards with magic people on them being played by three other fellas on another table (Magic the Gathering?) and a third table where a game that seemed to focus on one of the World Wars was being played by our host and another guy. These games had clearly not been started tonight – they had each been going on for months on end and would continue to last for many months thereafter. Everyone eyed us up with suspicion and I decided to leave Thrice where it was, firmly in the backpack.
Side note, there was not a single board in sight. No boards. At Kettering Board Games Club. The name of the club was misleading and I don’t think this particular misunderstanding had been my fault.
I wasn’t sure if they’d let us join in, considering we clearly had no idea how to play the games in question. If they refused to let us play non-board games with them then maybe I could sing ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ for them all and get last night’s goal done and dusted instead? After all, at least five of them were huge fans of magic so might have appreciated a song about how great magic is.
But the guy who greeted us at the door was on our side. ‘You can play this First World War game over here if you like. One of you can partner me and the other can partner Chris.’
We agreed and I sat next to Chris, who was thirteen or thereabouts and had zero respect for me.
Before the game could begin, the guy who met us at the door asked the question that had to be asked. ‘Who wants to be the Germans?’
And I said, ‘We will’ as soon as he had finished his sentence.
This caused the whole room to look at me as if I were an actual German spy. I was just trying to get the game started quickly but apparently you should never volunteer to be the evil Germans.
Chris rolled his eyes. ‘Fine, but I’m not happy about it.’ Yeah, shut up, Chris.
The game was hard and really complicated. We had to roll a bunch of dice at the same time (similar to Thrice but with a million dice) but each die meant something different: where we could shoot them, how much damage we’d do, how many bullets we used up, how many steps we could walk, etc. And Chris was not suffering me lightly. Every time I made a decision he’d say, ‘Great, you do you realise we’re going to lose now?’ or, ‘Nice one, I hope you like losing,’ or, ‘Would you like me to roll the dice for you?’ It turned out that Chris had actually written the rules to this game himself and we were testing them out for him. And he was now on the losing team, thanks to me. I could kind of see why he was so cross. I was making him lose at his own game, and he’d probably been up late figuring out all the rules and regulations, and then I’d walked in off the street and demolished all of his dreams within seconds. I noticed something familiar about the British soldiers and after asking Chris I lea
rned that yes, he had painted them all to look like the characters from Dad’s Army. At one point I had to decide whether to shoot Pike in the chest or the face. And I chose the face.
Even though I was awful at the game and Chris invented it, he lost all of his soldiers before I lost all of mine (up yours, Chris) and so the last moments of the game consisted of me fending off Corporal Jones and Godfrey from behind a rock before Fraser killed me with a long range shot from a tree he’d been hiding in. Chris was full of pure rage and so the other KBGC members sent him to the kitchen to calm down (I got the feeling this was not the first time Chris had blown his stack and been sent to the kitchen to calm down) and when he returned he brought back a packet of plain digestive biscuits even though there were caramel digestives in there, because we ‘hadn’t earned the nice ones’.
When we got up to go and said goodbye to everyone, none of the gamers looked up at us or acknowledged our farewells as they were way too engrossed. One of the people on the Hero Quest table didn’t hear what we said as he was too busy placing a card on the table in front of his opponent before grinning and saying, ‘H-ho! Looks like Greavesy wants a word with your wolflord!’ I still don’t know what that means but as we descended the stairs towards the exit I heard the other guy say, ‘I have been fearing this moment for quite some time.’
Wrestling
I thought it would be easy to find a new thing to do on Friday night, but actually there wasn’t a great deal of variety on offer in terms of activities in Kettering. One of the few options available to me was line dancing. Kettering has two line dancing classes a week but absolutely nothing going on on a Friday night. I started to worry but then, fortunately, I struck gold.
James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes Page 9