Hyperreal

I spent the weekend in Pitlochry, at the “Dance Fever” weekender organised by BoogieNights.

This is the third of three posts about it, in this one I will talk about the weekend as a whole, and in the others I talk about the workshops, and the dances.

I’ve already talked about the main content of the weekender, so this post will be about the rest of the stuff – the people, the organisation, stuff like that. It’s probably worth going through the weekend in mostly-chronological order, though if something important comes up, I’ll pull it out from the rest and deal with it as a whole…

So, let’s start from the very beginning. I arrived in Pitlochry on the train from Glasgow to Inverness. Although the weekend started at 5 pm, my train didn’t get there ’til about 6 – the train before it would have got in at about 3. No big deal. I had expected though that the train would have a few other dancers on it, but as it happens there weren’t any. In fact I found only one other person (excluding teachers) from anywhere near Glasgow at the weekend. Most people seemed to have come from Edinburgh or Dundee. Not that this was a big problem. I still knew loads of people from my visits around Scotland (or their visits to Glasgow).

I was surprised that the hotel, although it has a rear entrance just at the railway station, doesn’t have any signs to say who they are – if I owned a hotel right next to a railway station, I’d want every person in the train, as well as the people getting off it to know I was there. Fortunately there was a “Dance Fever” sign that led me in to the hotel, where I was in good time to register.

But this is where the biggest problem for me of the whole weekend began. I was sharing a twin room with an “A. N. Other”, but although the hotel had spare keys for a lot of their rooms, they didn’t have one for mine. And as I had no idea who my room-mate was (beyond that I knew his name), and nor did anyone I asked, this wasn’t going to be easy. I managed though to get in to my room with the help of a master key to leave my stuff and get ready for dinner. I asked at the time if there were any spare single rooms I could maybe transfer into. I was told to come by to reception a bit later, but I decided I’d wait until after I’d eaten.

At dinner my already diminished opinion of the hotel shrank further. They were rather inflexible and didn’t allow me to sit with a group of people I knew (that table was full, and apparently chairs can’t be moved!) So I sat on my own and was ignored by the staff for the next wee while, as they seated and served other people. Even when I managed to attract the attention of one of the waitresses, she continued to ignore me. What did I do wrong??? With the help of some of the people who were getting served I finally did, but I was deeply unimpressed by this. Happily I was later joined by three charming ladies whom I had all to myself!

After dinner I went to investigate the room situation. At reception was someone just holding fort, so I went back to see if I could get into my room – no luck and still no luck finding anyone who knew who my roommate was either. So I went back to reception, this time with the event organiser to see if we could get this sorted out. The fellow at the desk could only tell us that there might be some spare rooms, and not much more than that. Then the duty manager appeared, and with a bit of negotiation and persuasion we convinced him to give us another room, although he couldn’t tell us how much it was going to cost, and he wasn’t even 100% sure that the room he had a key for was unoccupied. He also seemed to have some difficulty finding it in his own hotel.

Again, to my surprise, he didn’t have a master key to let me into my old room to get my stuff to move it, and so had to go back to the main desk and find one. For some crazy reason I let him go on his own, despite the fact that I wasn’t sure if he’d be able to find me again as both he and the other fellow (and the actual receptionist later) had to ask me what my old room number was repeatedly. So after about five minutes I went to look for him, and found him at reception, by which time the actual receptionist had appeared. She seemed to actually know what she was doing, and could work the computer to make my change of room official. The only remaining issue was cost, but no-one there was sure of the rates we were paying or what would be appropriate and so it was agreed to leave this until later.

And so I finally had my own (twin) room and my own key!!! I have to give a big, big thanks to Lindsay, the organiser of the weekend for helping to sort this out for me. Even though she had lots of other things to worry about, including a party that was starting in less than half an hour, she took the time to get this fixed. For me, this was the biggest, but not the only, example of the individual care and attention that she gave to all her guests that weekend. I was very impressed.

So, with that out of the way, I got to go to the party, finally!

Over this time I met lots of familiar faces, but also a good number of friendly folks that were entirely new to me. All through the weekend all the dancers were very friendly and there was a really good atmosphere.

One of the people who stands out was a crazy (but in a nice way ) French girl who wasn’t into Modern Jive, but much more into all the other (more advanced?) swing dances, like WCS and Lindy. She very kindly agreed to dance MJ with me, and to try to behave herself. She has a very, very playful style which is great if you can cope with it and go along with her, but with a poor wee inexperienced lad like me, she could easy have danced circles round me and made me look really stupid. She was fun to dance with though, and lovely company over the weekend.

The night ended at 1 am, and I hit my bed as soon as I could after.

This could well have been a mistake. In the morning, while still mostly asleep I was turning over in my bed to get comfortable and stretched out my right leg, only to get an attack of cramp in it! Ouch!!!! It took ages to get it back in a normal state and I could hardly walk on it. I figured some ibuprofen and a bath would help. And it’s just as well I decided to have a bath, as the shower control in my room had seized up. I decided not to complain about it, or even to mention it to Lindsay as I didn’t want to make a fuss, and I could cope with having slightly more leisurely baths rather than showers for a couple of days.

The bath did wonders for my seized up muscles, and I was only a little sore on Saturday morning with it.

What wasn’t so lucky were my feet – the left one in particular. Due to poor support in my formal-style dance shoes, I have injured the tendon(?) across the bottom of both my feet, and even with extra support now and better shoes, I sometimes still get some pain coming back. Saturday was quite a painful day for my left foot. So-much so that I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to do the party in the evening, and would have to miss a lot of Sunday too.

Fortunately there was an answer. At the weekend one of the dancers was offering foot massages for a very reasonable rate. They were, I think, based around Reflexology, with a bit of Reiki too, but whatever it was, it was lovely, and it made my foot better. I liked it so much, I’m even going to give you her name and web site. Her name is Aleks, she’s a great dancer (as I’m sure many of you already know), and this is her web site.

All of Saturday night and most of Sunday I hardly felt any pain at all from my feet – and what I did feel on Sunday was way less than I expected, even after all the abuse it got in the workshops – especially the mambo one! Although I am not entirely convinced by the principles of Reflexology, and I find the concept of Reiki very hard to believe, I’ve got to say that something in there worked for me. And as I’m told, you don’t have to believe it for it to work.

The Saturday party I’ve already talked about… Just want to say that after dancing with so many great folks at the BFG, some aspect of the dancing here wasn’t so good. I danced with a few women who, even though they are lovely dancers, didn’t give me a lot of eye contact, or even smile much. I don’t understand why they ask, and if I remember in the future I won’t waste my time by asking them. (I wonder if it’s an Edinburgh thing… ) Also a couple of girls tried to teach me moves or positions while we were dancing. My position is that when I’m learning I’m learning, but in a social dance I don’t really want extra instruction. Most of them didn’t push it though.

As I said, I went to my bed early to get a good night’s sleep before the next day, but the change of clock always leaves me feeling jet-lagged for a while as I tend to wake up an hour early the rest of the week. Sunday morning was no exception. I woke up at 7am (which was 8am as far as my body was concerned.) Sunday was going to be a bit of a zombie day…

I’m not sure what the solution to our next problem is, but it’s unfortunate that we had to vacate our rooms by 11 am, a whole 6 hours before the event finished. However that did give us plenty of time to sort out the cost of my room, if necessary… Which it wasn’t! They didn’t charge me any extra for the room. Either they figured they were making enough out of us, and the hassle I had was their fault, so they felt an extra room would be no big deal, or (and much more likely!) they just forgot about the extra room.

Either way, I was happy and wasn’t going to say anything…

I surprised myself by getting through Sunday morning without collapsing in a heap, and made it through to lunchtime. On both Saturday and Sunday I went out for lunch with a couple of other folks – two girls on Saturday, then the remaining one and one of the DJs on Sunday. Both times we went across to a baker’s shop, on Saturday we just bought sandwiches and ate them in the hotel.

On Sunday we decided to try out their restaurant. This turned out to be a bigger performance that you could imagine. We all decided we wanted a “char-grilled chicken panini”. As they only had one, we managed to agree to have a BBQ chicken panini and a BBQ-chicken-with-no-BBQ-sauce panini, but somehow this ended up with them putting the char-grilled chicken panini back in the chilled display cabinet. Despite our combined efforts, we couldn’t explain that we needed the panini they just returned to the display. Every time we said we said we wanted it they just smiled and said OK. Only when the “boss/cook” came out and I managed to explain the situation to him did we get our three meals.

Part of the difficulty here, and in the Hotel, is that most of the people serving us didn’t seem to have English as their first language. I’ve got no problem with foreigners working in our country – especially if they are all from the EU and so have a perfect right to be here and work here. I do have a problem though if I can’t get the service I need in due to communication difficulties.

Anyway, it was a nice lunch. Good company too.

I also got a chance to have a quick look around the town, which unsurprisingly I didn’t recognise any of since last being there as a 3 or 4 year old. The shops are predominately touristy. But as well as the usual tourist tat, there was a “Sheep Shop”, which sold all sorts of sheepy products. Who would have thought you could have run a business on sheep-centred novelty items?

The afternoon was fairly quiet as people started to leave early, which meant that the tea dance was a bit disappointing with a fairly low attendance. I talked about the music already, but thinking about it, I think there’s two reasons why I’m not into this sound. First of all, I’m just not into that kind of music to listen to. Second, I find dancing (at least MJ) to slow music just plain boring. Even if I went more bluesy, it’s still a bit ponderous. I also am not keen on blues dancing. It’s not so much that I don’t like getting so close to women and dancing with them, as I’m not sure I want “meaningless” closeness, for both positive and negative reasons. It’s hard to explain so I’m just going to leave it at that for the moment. Maybe I’ll figure out what I’m trying to say and post about it some other time.

The tea dance finished up much quicker than I thought it would though – I guess times flies when you’re having fun…

Afterwards it was good-byes, fairwells, so-longs… I stayed a bit longer than most as I was getting my train a bit later. I wasn’t the last out of the building, but might have been second-last.

The end felt a bit anti-climactic. There was a bit, I think, at the end of the tea dance where Lindsay thanked everyone involved, and received thanks back herself. But due to folks leaving in dribs and drabs after that it was hard to draw a nice conclusive line under it all. The journey home could have been a bit of a emotional crash after the high of the weekend, but I got to chat with a friend on the phone for part of the way and share some of the nonsense that was buzzing through my head, and a lot of which I’ve just written done to relay to you.

And that was it!

Time to give thanks!

Biggest thanks goes to Lindsay and her team (Jenni, Heather and Fiona) for running a great weekend. Everything seemed to go smoothly, and everyone enjoyed themselves. All credit to them and everyone else who contributed.

All the teachers were really good, and had an infectious enthusiasm for what they were doing. So, thanks to Fiona for the Mambo, Lindsay and Brady for WCS and MJ, and James for everything else! Also want to thank Wendy for sharing some of her style with the ladies – please keep coming back and teaching – we need more dancers like you!

I want to specially thank Lindsay and James for their positive feedback in class when I must have been doing things right – it did make me wonder, a) was everyone else doing it wrong, or b) was everyone else doing it right and it was those occasions when I got things right that I got praised? I’ll assume that it was neither, and I just missed the praise being directed at other folks.

Should also mention Alys, the belly dance teacher. Again, like Wendy’s, not a class I did, but the cabaret she put on with her students was really impressive. Oh to be able to move like that!!!

The DJs, John and Gilbert. They don’t get enough credit for the difficult job they do. I though they did splendidly.

And thanks to Aleks for some lovely dances, a brilliant cure for my sore feet, and just for being a friend.

Which only really leaves the other dancers to thank. I want to thank everyone I danced with over the weekend. Especially those that flattered me by asked me to dance, and those who had to endure the occasional dodgy move in what I otherwise hope was a smooth and pleasant experience. (When I’m especially enjoying a dance I tend to get a bit experimental, which can cause problems… )

I don’t want to start naming names, as I’d forget someone. But there were a few folks who just by being a friend to me made the weekend that bit extra. I hope you know who you are.

And finally, I have no more to say. It’s now your turn to leave a comment…