In my middle years I acquired a devotion to Radio 4, Stilton cheese and thermal vests - all of which I would have regarded with undisguised horror in my twenties.

At the same time, my fondness for silk ties, paella and British situation comedy has waned to the point of extinction. Is it wisdom or age? A bit of both I expect.

However, there is something to which I have become unexpectedly partial over the past five years; a pastime which in my youth I would have dismissed as being for sissy girls and boys too soft to play football.

I'm talking about ballroom dancing. I even started to take lessons this year, but unfortunately I was about 40 years and five stones too late.

It did not help matters that I was considered to have timing but no rhythm, while my wife had rhythm but no timing. Imagine two puppets suspended by loose knicker elastic rather than string and you begin to get the picture.

It did not help that we are both notorious corpsers. We ended up in the middle of the dance-floor, hands on knees, giggling like a couple of kids and were banished to the back of the hall.

When you try something so difficult and watch others achieve it with consummate ease, admiration cannot help but soar.

Which is why we are transfixed in front of the television every Saturday evening hanging on every word from Strictly Come Dancing judges Craig Revel-Horwood and Len Goodman.

I am not even put off by novice judge Aleesha Dixon's remorseless mangling of the mother tongue. "You was really gettin' the funness in that dance," she told one bemused contestant.

And I'm learning something new every week. I had assumed, for example, that the 'fleckle' often referred to by Goodman was some sort of Cockney shorthand for a dance step.

It is, in fact, a German word 'fleckerl,' and the step is most commonly found in the Viennese waltz.

When I found myself studying the comely Flavia Cacace's skills as a Latin-American dancer rather than her more obvious attributes, I knew I'd passed the point of no return.

I'm now a ballroom nerd. It's an age thing.



* It has to be the most ghastly political love-in since the news about John Major and Edwina Currie first broke over a disbelieving land.

Interviewed on American television, Hilary Clinton came over all girlie and gushing about David Miliband, describing our Foreign Secretary as 'vibrant, vital, attractive and smart.'

He said she was 'delightful to deal with one on one.

Enough already! It's bad enough imagining these people in positions of power without imagining them in positions of any other kind.

It makes you yearn for the days of Golda Meir and Ted Heath – when sexual attraction and politics were distant strangers.


What do you think? Send a letter to news@chiobserver.co.uk or leave a comment below.

Click here to go back to Chichester news

Click here to go back to Bognor Regis news

Click here to go back to Midhurst and Petworth news

To tell us where in the world you are reading this story click here to add yourself to our readers' map.