The joy of tap dancing

The first lockdown … those strange months encompassed the very worst of times but occasionally times of unexpected joy.
Thirteen members of my family were locked up together. And after we’d compiled the “things to do so we don’t kill each other” list, four of us decided to learn how to tap dance. Willing(ish) participants were me, my 25-year-old daughter, my 35-year-old niece and my 93-year-old mum. We purchased some shiny black tap shoes on Amazon and sprayed them with sanitiser (remember that?). The plan was to follow some online beginners’ tap dance tutorials, and complete one routine a week. We held a 15-minute class every day at 10.45am — timed to start just after the daily keep-fit session and to end just before the first of the day’s rows with my sons about Zoom School attendance.
Most weeks our progress went as follows: Monday — unable to do any of the moves at ALL. Tuesday — zero improvement on the moves but some tangible improvements on facial gestures. Wednesday — the beginnings of something resembling a shitshow. Thursday — a glimmer of hope, though limbs still flailing and body language still ridiculous. Friday — ‘we may be getting close to absolute beginner level now’. Followed by the Final Performance (to nobody), which we video and then celebrate with zeitgeist banana bread (obvs).
The obvious truth is that tap dancing is hard and progress is slow — imagine doing a Sudoku with your mind while playing a drum kit with your feet. The sequences only bake themselves into your muscle memory after they have dragged you through long periods of moving like Ann Widdecombe on Strictly.
We were hardly the poster girls of tap. My mum’s eyesight was failing and she found it hard to see the screen so we would shout out the moves as we did them. And she lost one of her hearing aids on week two of lockdown, so she ended up feeling the music rather than listening to it. It took us from the beginning of Barnard Castle-gate till the first NHS doorstep clap to properly nail the elusive double-shuffle-pullback-flap-shim-sham-shimmy-ball-change. But oh my, it is joyful when it comes together.
It’s the harsh clack of shoe metal on a wooden floor. It’s the alchemy of trying to combine sharp, mathematical moves with a dance that is fluid and flowing. It’s the delight of the music and the challenge to do something initially impossible, and then sticking with it till it eventually becomes possible. The moment that your paradiddle-stomp-brush-spank-heel-paddle-roll finally lands is a delight worth all the degradation it took to get you there.
My mum is 97 now, and the videos I have of our terrible tapping are my favourites. They tell me everything about her capacity for joy, and her determination to keep trying new things. If she ever does die, I’ll be showing them at her funeral.
And here’s the ultimate tap magic — once it’s baked, it’s bookmarked in your brain. The lockdown tap class was four years ago, but I can still just about manage a toe-punch-time-step-heel-click-shiggy-bop. And only last month I went to a hen night for a friend where we learnt a tap routine to her favourite song. Unknown to her, on the day of her wedding months later, when she headed back down the aisle, the organist started hammering out the same song. And that tap muscle memory kicked in. She and her brand new husband tapped all the way to the church door. Best. Exit. Ever.