Is It Just Me? Read Online Free PDF Page A

Danube waltz. You’ll become known for it. Ironic dancing is, I think I can confirm, the solution to the dancing problem. It’s all very knowing, you get to have a nice time making fun of your five left feet and your limby-ness, but underneath it all you can actually have a jolly good bop. Terrific.
    One thing we do get excellent at as regards dance, and that’s watching it. One of our favourite television programmes in our thirties is focused around the art of ballroom dancing.
    Granny alert. Were you born in 1912? What about ‘jamming’? Will I ever turn into the person who whips out a guitar at the end of a party like crazy cousin Steve? Make sweet music?
    Oh, come on. Firstly, you’re not the person who can stay awake long enough to see the end of a party. Admit it, even now with your insatiable appetite and the lure of a Penguin you can’t stay awake for a midnight feast. Staying up all night has always been a chore and just gets worse as the years go on. (NB: tips for staying up all night: throw a glass of water in your face, rub ice cubes in your eyes, eat coffee granules, do cola shots and lick a 9-volt battery.)
    Secondly, you do
not
want to be that guitar jamming person. Everyone hates that person. The person in the dirty T-shirt who breaks up the party by dragging out a guitar and performing their innovative, minor-key acoustic version of ‘Eleanor Rigby’. (Please note – cool, crazy cousin Steve can now be found working in Greggs on the Waterlooville High Street.) That’s not how an evening should end. An evening should end at 10.45 p.m. sharp with ‘I’m in the Mood for Dancing’, enjoyed whilst throwing a few shapes, eating pizza with one hand, before falling over sideways onto a bean bag (simultaneously crushing the person whose rendition of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ you’ve just interrupted).
    Oh. Actually, that does sound sort of amaze-balls.
    If you mean amazing, it is. It really is. It’s the kind of fun you were born to have. Other people may be born to sit around in smoky rooms listening to Radiohead and not washing their hair for six months because apparently it eventually cleans itself but, for you, music’s not meant to be a downer, a conversation-starter or a status symbol. For you, it’s just a reassuring sugar-rush. A bag of Flumps. A choc-ice. Something to enhance . . .
jollity
.
    ‘JOLLITY’? It’s sounding dweeby again.
    Embrace your inner music dweeb. For by telling you this, and any readers who might also lack the muso gene, you can learn that jollity is every bit as worthwhile as cool. More so, in fact. You’ll defend jollity until you fall exhausted to the floor. You’ll stop trying to join a club that you weren’t born to be a member of. You’ll stop wondering why dancing to Billy Joel is some kind of guilty pleasure, while an undernourished student smoking a spliff to Pink Floyd is somehow acceptable. It’s one area where you’re able to just be who you are, not caring one jot whether or not your neighbours can hear you singing along to
Annie.
* sings in an embarrassing American accent * ‘The sun’ll come out tomorrowww . . .’
    * whispers * That does sound more me.
    We are all about the musical, Little M. Now put down that Guns N’ Roses tape you were about to put on (and pretend to love).
    I will. And do you know what I am going to do? There’s still time to go to the music block for Miss Everett’s
The Sound of Music
auditions . . .
    Well done. Go, girl.
    Yeah. Because knowing all this, I must be in with a good chance of scooping a lead role.
    Right, don’t get your hopes up . . . Hello? She’s gone. Oh, dear. We only get the part of ‘Waltzing Man in Ballroom scene’. I am
not
bitter. It’s fine. No really, I’m over it . . . (it could have least have been ‘Waltzing Woman’). As I say, over it . . .

3
Hobbies
    A s I officially lack the muso gene, music isn’t something I could ever legitimately put down as a hobby. (That is, until the