Double-flack and grapevine

Sadly, my boxercise class is on a break until mid-September, so to plug the gap I went tonight to a huge cheese-fest that's called Body Attack in Tooting Leisure Centre.

The place is great, buzzy, quite modern, nice toothy receptionists, toilets that flush. But the class.... I no like.

Body Attack, I now know, means trying to copy a load of barndance-style moves to cheesy pop-dance, with the thirty or so women who make up the rest of the class gracefully perspiring as they prance and clap and jive and spin and clap and wilt and gambol. All the clapping!.......how it grated - clap clap, spin your arms, grapevine, clap and whoop - all this balls. It made me sweat and, because I got almost every routine wrong, feel horribly self-conscious. I doubt I'llgo back - the headset, the mirrorball, the naffness of it all.

It's now made me question the whole array of "Body-X" classes that all the local leisure centres put on. "Body Combat" sounded good but like this one perhaps you need to go a few times to understand what the hell's going on before you can actually exercise properly. And by that time boxercise will be back on.

I've been to a different class once before, when boxercise was on a break for Christmas, and both times now it's made me realise what a punishing class it is, with better music, a better instructor, and more opportunities to endanger your classmates. It cannot return quickly enough.