I've Been Voted Miss Slinky!

Great news! I was elected Miss Slinky by my local Slimming World group last week. I'd have never thought this possible a few years ago, and even when I first joined Slimming World and became aware of the Miss Slinky competition, I never imagined that this title could ever apply to me.
Five of us were originally nominated in our local group, but two dropped out, and the three remaining had to give a speech about how we had got to our weight-loss, and bring 'before' photos to show how much we had shed. I'd volunteered to go along in my leotard, dance-skirt and ballet shoes! Another young lady looked fabulous in a slim black cocktail dress, and the third felt rather underdressed, not having opted for such 'outlandish' clothing. I also took along a pair of very large trousers I used to wear to show them.
I found myself in a strange state of mind about the photos of me 4 years ago when I still had the 4 stone to shed that I've now lost. Once they would have embarrassed me, but when I was looking for 'before' photos, I was thinking "The fatter the better!" and I could look quite dispassionately at them, as they were in a way of another person. At that time I was just starting to consult a dietician, but the local sports centre which helped me so much hadn't opened, and I hadn't yet discovered ballet classes or Slimming World. I certainly looked very broad in the beam and full in the face!
To counterbalance these photos I also took along two recent ones of me jumping and balancing at a Northern Ballet Theatre Workshop. People said I sounded full of life, and I certainly emphasized how rejuvenated I felt with the weight-loss, ballet classes and pleasures of retirement, not forgetting the invaluable help of the sensible Slimming World system.
So I was delighted when they voted for me as Miss Slinky, and I was adorned with one of those beauty-queen sort of sashes (so far from my old world!) and given a trophy and some lovely flowers. They didn't actually ask me to dance a few steps, though I'd have been prepared to do so!
I'm still on target with my weight, though I've found it more of a struggle in the past few months than in the first six of this year. And Christmas is coming, so I'm trying to reduce the weight further so that I can enjoy more of its treats.
Losing weight, which is such a terrible slog, is well worth doing for the extra energy and, hopefully, longer and healthier life it can give you. Slimming World holds such competitions to encourage others to achieve their aim.

Remembrance Day & Fall of Berlin Wall

The ongoing loss of so many of our young servicemen in Afghanistan makes Remembrance Sunday even more poignant in our time. What a shame that loss of life in war is not allowed to become an outmoded phenomenon that hardly anyone remembers! Yet unfortunately we know only too well the sense of waste, and we feel for the never-ending bereavement experienced by families who had no choice in the matter. I could just about understand the initial incursion into Afghanistan (though the Russians had already shown how difficult it was to win a war there), but I have always been against war in Iraq - one of my main reasons being that I didn’t want our own young people to die there, although I never imagined that it would be hundreds of them that would.
Yet of course Remembrance Day is mostly associated with the two World Wars in which so many private citizens had to take part as well as the professional military. It is hard for our minds to take in the vastness of the numbers involved, and we owe them a huge debt of respect and gratitude. As one of them once said to me, six years their youth were stolen. And those who survived had to cope with a lifetime of harrowing memories. They were asked to make the ultimate sacrifice, and they were not always rewarded.
We are lucky in that our generation has not been obliged to fight. When my husband was a small boy in the Second World War, he knew that his grandfather had fought in the First, and that his father was fighting in the Second. “And shall I have my war when I grow up?” he asked. His parents became very angry and told him not to be silly. No doubt it was too painful for them to contemplate another of these horrors, and they must have hoped, as had people 20 years previously, that it was a war to end all wars.
Some years ago I wrote a poem about how two minutes' silence once a year was not asking us to do a lot in return for all they had given. The poem, in a form called a villanelle with a double refrain, was called 'Two Minutes' Silence', and here it is:


It's not too much to offer those who died -
Two minutes' silence where we pause each year -
Enough to see war's waste is vilified.

Our fallen heroes are their nation's pride.
Too rarely in our thoughts do they appear -
It's not too much to offer those who died.

Yet war commands official homicide:
Let's think what lurks beneath the bold veneer,
Enough to see war's waste is vilified.

We'll honour more the dead if we provide
A better system in our human sphere -
It's not too much to offer those who died.

Let all the forms of partnership be tried,
Alternatives weighed up, and costs made clear,
Enough to see war's waste is vilified.

To heroes let no glory be denied,
So due to conscript and to volunteer.
It's not too much to offer those who died -
Enough to see war's waste is vilified.


My father-in-law fought in the Second World War, and was wrongly declared to be killed in action. We can but imagine how his wife felt to be told this. His name is found among the fallen on Durham War Memorial, and he later went to see it there. Yet he had only been injured in Sicily and invalided out and sent to Ireland to do educational work with barely literate soldiers. Such must be the chaos of war so often that the authorities lost track of him. He lived on till his 70's in 1989, a piece of shrapnel permanently in his lung. (Always setting off airport alarms!)
A year or so ago I went on an Internet taster session on family history, and one of the sets of records we were shown was of the military. So I thought I'd check up on my father-in-law, and see how the records now stood. To my surprise, he was not only still recorded as killed in action, but they were able to tell me on precisely which day he died, and in which cemetery in Normandy he is buried! He never fought in Normandy, but perhaps his regiment did and it was assumed he had perished. He presumably has a headstone there. With someone else’s body underneath. The Internet course tutor said she would quote this example of misrecording in future courses. My husband tells me that no-one in his family knew about this presumed grave in Normandy all these years. Father-in-law would probably gone and visited it, being a Francophile and, indeed, a French teacher! And fellow-soldiers of his must have been buried there.
Even war can bring out a sense of humour in people, which can help them to get through its rigours. I remember seeing the novelist Frederick Forsyth being interviewed on German TV about his time as a POW. He said that, having been to a British public school, he found the experience very similar, except that the food was slightly better in the camp!
I was born towards the end of the War, and my first memory of the subject, as a baby, was being told one day while we were seated near the Royal Pavilion in Brighton that bombs had fallen nearby only a month before. I was actually born during an air-raid. My father had had to go out in the blackout to try and find a taxi for my mother, almost being thrown over the handlebars of his motor-bike in his panic and in the darkness. After I was born, I was taken straight down to the shelter in the cellar, but my mother, who'd had a difficult delivery, had to be left in her bed, with just a blanket over her head to protect her from any flying glass. I apparently quickly developed a reputation for leading the crying, and nurses told my mother that they always knew which was her baby!
As I was starting to grow up, heaps of rubble were very familiar sights where houses had been destroyed. They also became playgrounds for us: what would Health and Safety have to say about this today?! Today's young people must find such a scenario very difficult to imagine. Actually, I once attended a portrait pottery taster session, and there was a young boy there who was clearly fascinated by the Second World War, so far from what he knows. I told him about one of my mother's stranger experiences. She was a Council office worker, and one night (yes, night) a coachload of Council workers were taken off to a mystery destination. She found herself in the port of Newhaven, manning a weighbridge for tanks and trucks for the Normandy Landings before they were embarked!

Another milestone we are recalling now is the Fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago. I remember what an exciting time it was in 1989 when freedom was breaking out in people's souls and one wondered which would be the next Communist country to fall. I had visited a number of them during the 1980's. In Poland in 1988 one sensed that change was in the air. The churches were full of people listening but not usually taking communion: it was a political gesture, I was told, rather than a religious one. Yet the breaching of that monstrous Wall is truly iconic: it symbolizes all the anguish and pointless waste that the two Germanies had to put up with after the War. For all that we used to be enemies, we could empathize with the euphoria of that night.
Later, we talked to an elderly East Berlin couple who shared our table several times on a Rhine cruise, and we asked them if they'd gone through the Wall that night. No, they said - they were sure it was a hoax! They could not imagine it could possibly be true. But they went through the second night. They were touched by our interest in the history of Berlin (if you can speak the language, you discover how nice the Germans are), and gave us some pre-War post-cards of the city that their uncle had published, stacks of which they'd discovered when he died.
We visited Berlin the year after the Wall fell, and elsewhere in East Germany three weeks before Reunification. We observed the strange sight of West German military trucks bringing the new army uniforms to the East, and watched the signposts for Karl-Marx-Stadt being taken down and those for Chemnitz going back up. As our guide said at the end of our tour, we were leaving a country to which we would never return.
I've found German a useful holiday language for the sort of travels we tend to make. On winter holidays in the Canaries we joined in several times with German walking groups on the islands. From them we sometimes heard sad tales of the divided Germanies. One couple who had been able to move to the West had visited their parents in the East shortly before the Fall of the Wall. On that occasion the man's mother had shown them the family prayer-book, a prized possession, quite old and valuable. He did not know that she would secretly slip it into their suitcase before they left. East Germans were not allowed to export such things, and of course it was discovered at the border. The couple was held a long time by the border police, worried about whether they could get back to West Germany. Eventually they were released, but the prayer-book wasn't, and was never seen again. Soon after, the barriers were no more, but this family treasure, which could now have travelled easily, was gone for good. It would be easy for us to say, "The Germans shouldn't have started the War", but countless are the ordinary people on all sides who have to suffer because of political decisions.

About Carrying Weight Around

The Slimming World organisation has two striking visual aids. One is a parcel weighing 2 lb., which is quite heavy. If you lost 2 lb. in a week, that might not sound very much, but it is awfully heavy if you hold it in your hands. The other visual aid is a parcel weighing 1 stone. This is so heavy you almost can't lift it. After much effort, I've now lost over 4 stone off my top weight. When I think that for a long time I carried around the equivalent of four of those parcels strapped to my body, it almost blows my mind. I am very relieved to have got these 'parcels' away from my organs. I happen to come from a line of long-lived females, and want to be fit in my old age. To start with, weight loss was very slow, and it took me a long time to get down out of the 'obese' category, but, having done that, I slipped down fairly rapidly through the 'overweight' into the 'normal' category, and have now been on target for 6 months or so. I had been too heavy for over 20 years, and now I feel decidedly fitter than I did 20 years ago. It is like being given a second youth, and I feel I am living in magical times. I cannot believe what now looks out of the mirror at me in the dance studio. It's marvellous to have a waistline again! And it gives a tremendous boost when so many people come up to me and comment, often incredulously, on the amount of weight I've lost. And, no, I don't intend to disappear altogether. If anyone reading this is overweight, be assured that it's worth the slog to get rid of this millstone. And you will do it with more chance of success in the company of a slimming organisation who will keep an eye on you and applaud even your minor successes. Rather than carrying weight around, it's better to lift weights - even small ones - to increase bone density through exercise.

Weight-Loss Creates A 65-Year-Old Ballet Student

Having lost 4 stones in weight and become very fit since retirement, I feel keen to encourage other people who might like to do the same. During my career in a demanding sedentary job, there was little time for anything but work, and I became very overweight for a long time. After retiring I was eager to develop new interests, and getting fit and losing weight were a high priority. I did a lot of walking, and when a Sports Centre opened in my local village about 4 years ago, it gave a great boost to my aim, providing lots of helpful activity classes. I was soon going 3 times a week or more to aerobics, Pilates and yoga. This worked off the calories, made me more supple, and prepared the way for when adult ballet classes would appear on the horizon.

I tried to eat sensibly, but was not getting on very well with weight loss on my own, so I had myself referred to a National Health dietician, under whose excellent guidance I lost 2 stones in 2 years. I was still not at the kind of weight I wanted, however, and certainly not the shape, and I was starting to put on a bit of weight again, so I followed up a leaflet put through my door and joined Slimming World.

This organisation meets once a week, weighs everyone and gives advice and support. Its system of diet is very sensible, not forcing people to be forever counting calories, but recommending an emphasis on certain types of foods over others. Some kinds of food can be eaten as much as one wants, but with others one must be more sparing, and some one should try to avoid altogether. As with the dietician's advice, one tries to cut down as much as possible on fats and sugars - and pastry and ready-made dishes are major culprits here. But Slimming World has good psychology and recognises that people need occasional treats; it is also non-judgmental.

Their system seems to work, and it is possible to lose at least a pound or half a pound a week with it. I have lost a further 2½ stone with them, making a total loss off my top weight of around 4 stone, and I have got a proper hourglass shape back. The community of slimmers who attend these classes are of great support, and are very nice people with whom one wants to keep in contact.

My greatest passion at the moment is learning to do ballet. I've loved watching it all my life, ever since I saw the Red Shoes film as a tiny child and then watched Doreen Wells and Anton Dolin dancing on stage in Coppelia. But my mother could not afford to send me to dancing classes. I also believed the commonly held myth that, if you haven't started ballet by the age of 7, it's too late. Then, a couple of years ago, I discovered that Norfolk Dance holds classes for adult beginners.

So, around the same time as I started attending Slimming World, I began to do ballet at the age of 63 and have now been doing it for 2 years. And it is the most generation-mixing activity I've been involved in, for we have students ranging from in their teens and twenties through middle age to my sort of antiquity. And we are all passionate about it, and get on well.

Ballet is difficult, but the problems are perhaps more mental than physical, as it is much more of a struggle than it used to be trying to remember sequences of steps. But one does eventually progress, and while I'm clearly not going to make a career out of dancing at my age, I can still get a lot of satisfaction and sense of achievement from it. From one class a week at first, I've gone on to four or six a week as I've discovered more being put on and as I've gained in experience myself, able to attend classes at a variety of levels.

Ballet term has just ended, so I shan't be able to write about topical ones until nearly a month's time, when I have the good luck of attending a 3-day summer school with one of my normal ballet teachers, Nicky, and the director of the organisation where I started to learn ballet, Norfolk Dance - and he used to dance with the Royal Ballet. Good old Norwich, arranging the sort of opportunity one would normally only associate with London!

As well as doing daily class, we'll be learning some of the repertoire of Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake and The Firebird, and also character-dancing and techniques of mime. Of course I shall write about that. We have been very lucky in that Norfolk Dance has already arranged a number of workshops for us with visiting ballet companies (Northern Ballet Theatre, Rambert Dance and the Richard Alston Dance Company), which have stretched us quite a lot.

This last week I attended the two remaining ballet classes and, first, a tap-dance class - something I have started more recently. I've just had to pick up the moves as I go along, lacking basic training in tap, but it's amazing what you can do by just shuffling around. It's in a group full of adolescents larking about and chattering freely, a world I don't otherwise have much contact with, so it is eye-opening! Yet the class also contains several ladies clearly in their seventies - whom I've seen performing on stage.

These tap classes have their surreal moments. At an earlier one in our village (for adults, this one, not teenagers) I was amazed that several of the participants brought their toddlers along, who stood around within inches of us, in grave danger of being kicked as we danced. I couldn't help calling it 'the toddler-kicking class'. In Tuesday's class with adolescents something I found equally mind-boggling was that several of the teenagers were tap-dancing in bare feet! They didn't appear in the least put off by banging around in bare feet, but it seemed a million miles away from the principle of tap-dancing! One of them was not actually dancing in two bare feet, but in one bare foot and one bandaged foot, having sprained her ankle! She clearly did not want to miss practice before her exams. These are all priceless images which I'm sure I'll never forget.

We did four of our tap routines. It's an enjoyable form of dance, not as strenuous as I expected. The one which I continued to find most fun was a show number which we had previously done with invisible canes (another surreal moment!) but now we had the canes, which we manipulated, twirled, threw into the air, changed hands with and banged on the floor with as much aptitude as we could muster. Michala, the teacher, is very imaginative, and always makes her classes fun for her participants. In one of the new routines we divided into sub-groups and I was given the foot-bandaged teenager to follow, who obligingly saw me through; her mother dances in the same troupe.

My last two ballet classes were with small groups, with five participants in each. Holidays, illness or end-of-term tasks were already taking their toll. Those of us who were left had the benefit of all the more attention from our ever-watchful teacher Jane. As in all classes we start with barre work and move on to work in the centre. Jane found that we had all made progress with barre work and held ourselves more like ballerinas. Ballet is certainly very good for improving your posture, and therefore for supporting your skeleton in later life. A lot of our centre work is based on direction- and weight-changes, and co-ordinating the arm and leg positions appropriately - a lot for the brain to contend with, and I always have great difficulty remembering routines! We did an interesting one with waltz-steps and hops and changes of direction and tried to let ourselves go more to the spirit of the music.

It becomes clear that one of the moves I'll have to practise over the vacation is combining slow, gentle arm movements with swift, sharp foot movements. It's a bit like asking your brain to make one hand pat your head and the other circle your stomach - it comes far from naturally! While your foot flies in and out, it's difficult not to let your arms be jerky as well. So the brain-cells and muscle-memories will need a lot of conditioning there, and I shall also have to work at straightening my back leg when lifted behind - I'm not stretching my muscles enough at the moment. And the notorious pirouettes, of course - always tricky!

The Friday class is more advanced than the Thursday one (I waited till I'd danced for a year before joining it), and I found exercises in different combinations to what I'd met before, but it's very exciting. We ended with a complex routine of turns, arabesques and hops which we had to dance singly, and I found the music went too fast for my brain to keep up with. I was still trying to work out what came next, but I tried my best, and have noted the moves down and must try to practise them in the vacation. I agree with Jane that the simpler class on Thursdays (introduced this year) has helped me grapple more effectively with the more difficult routines on Fridays.

Like the good teacher she is, Jane ended both classes by telling us of the progress we'd made, and after one of them some of us went for a drink at the Rushcutters' Arms in Norwich to celebrate the 30th birthday of a chap in the class. It was a beautiful way to end the term, sitting by the river watching the swans and getting to know each other better away from the dance studio.