"It's dead, he's did!"

I didn't get to play piano as much as I'd hoped to last night, but that's not neccessarily a bad thing. I try to keep Friday evenings clear of engagements but generally something crops up, so last night I ended up going out, launching myself into the night all full of promise and blind faith. It was a very interesting evening and I was alseep by midnight (even better).

This morning, after I'd read the papers and had breakfast, I went to a spin class at the gym. (Or maybe it was RPM.. is there a difference?) Until I did one of these classes I thought it was a complete waste of time. My reasoning was that you could, if you wanted to, do it yourself. You could just get on a stationary bike whenever you liked and you could just pedal away like mad and if you knew what you were doing - which i didn't, but that doesn't affect the logic - you'd have the same result but you wouldn't be tied to an arbitrary class schedule, or have to fight with the lyrca princesses for a bike.

But I was so wrong. The critical ingredient is something very old-fashioned and sadly underrated: shame. I don't know if this happens to the others in the class, but whenever I do this I reach a point within about the first 10 minutes where if I wasn't in a group setting I'd just get off the bike and go lie down. But I can't. There's the instructor, for a start, and then there's the 20 or 30 other people in the class, and the walk to the door would be a March of Shame, especially when you factor in (as I have to) the extra embarassment of somehow extricating myself from the bike in a way that's not completely graceless.

So I'm stuck there, and I just have to grin and bear it. I clockwatch, I let my mind wander (and I have some of my best thoughts when I'm under this sort of stress, trying desperately for a distraction. I use the word 'best' very cautiously here), I check out other people in the class.

Today we had a charming New Zealand woman with just about the strongest Kiwi accent I've ever heard. I know it's all very cliched but I do love an accent, and at one point she told us "bug strong ligs". An acquaintance of mine in London (one of the about two dozen people who forwarded me the sex-with-bike story) swears that one day he was watching a Kiwi soap opera (I'm guessing 'Shortland Street' but he can't recall) and he heard this line of dialogue:

It's dead, he's did!

My mate realised that when you run this backwards through the vowel shifts, you arrive at the message "it's Dad, he's dead".

Last note on accents. I have a particular thing for South African accents. And no, I'm not proud if it.