One of the things I notice is that if I’m undecided between two moves, I will often unintentionally do something which is “in between”. It’s difficult to think of a real example, but if you can imagine mixing a shoulder slide and a step-across and hitting yourself in the head you’ll get the idea. The same thing sometimes happens if I’m thinking of what move to do next - your body unconsciously starts performing the next move instead of the current one.

As your dancing evolves, you are constantly becoming aware of new subtleties. Sometimes you realise that something you do is wrong, and that it must have been wrong the whole time, since you haven’t changed anything. You can’t understand why you never noticed before, but often it’s to do with anticipation in your partners. For example, it could be that you’ve always been a bit wishy-washy in a basket, but until recently your partners all realised it was going to be a basket and went into the right position anyway. Now perhaps you’ve added some other similar move to your repertoire and they’re no longer “helping” you so much.

Alternatively, it could be that you’ve been training yourself out of some bad habit which was stopping the problem - for example if someone tended to grip on to their partner’s hands, then when they managed to stop doing this they could easily go to a hold which was too loose, and start having problems letting go when they didn’t want to.

Jo… Yep, Stirling was what we figured… Might be a (hushed tones) LeRoc alternate somewhere around about there too.

Although she didn’t turn up to either of my two usual haunts this week, I’m still hopeful for her.