Tripped up by the light fantastic and resigned to it

By Mike Lowson

Published:

THIS week, I have been desperately trying to recall exactly when it was that I walked under a ladder, broke a mirror, ran over a black cat, opened an umbrella indoors, kicked a chimney sweep and capped it all by spilling the salt.

To borrow a grammatically weak but nonetheless memorable line from the song Born Under a Bad Sign, made famous by 1960s supergroup Cream: “If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all.”

There has been no shortage of bad luck recently, with the world’s economy creaking, banking in disarray, forecasts of an un-merry Christmas for retailers and job losses appearing by the thousand.

The only thing in the black, it seems, is the lethal black ice on our untreated roads.

Then, just when things couldn’t get any worse, they did. The announcement was disastrous, the impact devastating, the reaction dolorous and the future prospects are as dull as dank ditchwater. Forget the credit crunch and high-seas piracy, the big news of the week was John Sergeant stepping down from TV show Strictly Come Dancing, apparently.

If you have been living in solitary confinement in a tent in Torridon or a croft in the Cairngorms, you might have missed the wall-to-wall coverage of the former political journalist’s departure from the frothy Saturday-night dancing show because he thought he had a good chance of winning it. Confused? Yes, me too.

The precise details escape me, but it seems he was a reasonably rotten dancer, the judges told him so and the public decided they wanted some added entertainment by voting to keep him on the show each week. Two feet with left-leaning tendencies aren’t ideal for an unbiased political correspondent’s credibility, I reckon.

Actually, I don’t give a stuff about Strictly. I find leaping about on a dance floor slightly less fun than spending a day spectating at a chiropodist’s surgery. Even attempts by slinky female dancers to make it more watchable by wearing skimpy outfits that are as revealing as an onion bag have failed to grab my attention.

OK, I confess to having a sly peek at their bulbous onions from time to time, but dancing is still as pointless as a waterproof teabag, I reckon.

That’s just sour grapes on my part, of course, as my dancing skills are akin to threading a needle while wearing boxing gloves. The brain knows what to do, but there is no way the body can achieve the desired result. There are few things at which I am more useless than dancing. Brain surgery, nuclear physics, applied mathematics and snooker come to mind, but tripping the light fantastic is top of my “can’t do, won’t do” list.

That said, I am a long-time fan of fellow P&J columnist Robbie Shepherd’s Scottish dance music radio show, Take the Floor, but I take the high road instead if I am asked to dance. Why, then, should Strictly capture my attention? Well, it wasn’t the show but John Sergeant’s resignation that caught my eye.

It used to be accepted that when a business hit the buffers or politics went pear-shaped, those at the top resigned. Nowadays, toughing things out until long after one’s sell-by date has become commonplace, so John’s early departure was a breath of fresh air.

There have been some high-profile resignations recently, including top HBOS and RBS bankers, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, two senior executives at the Scottish Ambulance Service, various football managers and the controller of Radio 2, along with the asinine clot who dropped her in the mire.

In comparison, not one of the councillors responsible for driving Aberdeen to the edge of bankruptcy has seen fit to go. Similarly, those responsible for cancer patients in Grampian now having the longest waiting times in Scotland have not stepped down and are unlikely to do so. I’m sure there are many other resignation candidates we could all name.

Some say resigning is an easy option and that it’s better for people under pressure to stick around and use their expertise to solve the issue. I’m not convinced. If they were that good, the problem probably wouldn’t have happened.

It’s typical that with global crises looming, we in the UK have spent more time discussing a dancing dilemma than the rampant recession. If we are going down, we’re going slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, it seems.

Bad luck, John. I suggest you now join me as a conscientious objector to anything involving a dance floor. If you really miss the limelight, console yourself with the knowledge that while it’s all very well soaring with eagles, turkeys don’t get sucked into jet engines.

So from one tango turkey to another, make your next dancing step a large sidestep, John, and one so big that even the Strictly judges will give it top marks.

Do that and you’ll get my vote, too.

Finally, to my heroes of the week and congratulations to Inverness baker Harry Gow, who has recorded an album of Christmas favourites to raise money for a children’s charity. The chairman of the eponymous bakery and confectionery firm which has outlets in Easter Ross, Inverness and Sutherland has pledged to donate cash from the sales of the 20-track CD to the Children’s Hospice Association Scotland.

The disc features him singing a selection of festive classics and hymns, such as Little Donkey, In The Bleak Midwinter, A Winter’s Tale, White Christmas and Little Drummer Boy. You can buy it in any of his shops.

In my totally unscientific but highly palatable quest last year to find the best rolls in Scotland, Mr Gow’s offerings were gold-medal material, so I wish him every success with the CD. It might not top the Christmas charts, but it might just bring some welcome cheer to the desperately-ill children in hospices and to their parents.

When you consider what these families face, quibbling about dancing celebrities seems trivial to the point of stupidity.

It is, to paraphrase John Sergeant, just a joke too far.