Daft Old Duffer returns. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
All my life I have been heavily influenced by a chance remark made long ago, by a doctor.
He declared that he could judge the well-being or otherwise of an elderly patient by how he or she put on his/her pants or knickers. Standing up or sitting down.
Ever since that long-ago day I have always donned my pants whilst upright. And hence, over the years developed the dance I have entitled the Bare-Rump Bedroom Stomp.
All tangled up
This consists of me standing bent over as far as I am able, holding my pants in an ‘open’ position somewhere below knee height and struggling to balance on one foot long enough to get the other into the so-near-yet-so-distant opening.
Unfortunately, as others will vouch who have tried it, this involves more than a simple up and down movement. It is far more complicated than that. For the insertee foot must be lifted, inserted by some form of forward manoeuvre, then thrust down. Avoiding of course, any toe/waist band entanglement.
All before the other – balancing – foot decides it’s had enough and needs a rest.
It’s all in the angle
This move is rarely if ever accomplished in one easy motion. On the contrary it involves a whole series of lift-up and put-down moves, whilst I strive to find and keep the right angle of one-foot balance.
Thus the resulting dance as I sway and stumble about the bedroom, bouncing off various items of furniture while my would-be insertee foot lifts and thumps down, usually quite rhythmically on the carpet.
Not unlike a Native American War dance in fact.
Chanting accompanies the dance
Except that mine is somewhat more complex, involving as it does intervals in which I let go of the pants, straighten to my full standing height and utter a few Anglo-Saxon colloquialisms, or chants, the meanings of which are lost in the midsts of time but which remain, nonetheless potent.
I am well aware that I may well one morning be discovered laying inert and helpless on the floor, still bare of rump.
But of one thing I am determined. I will be found to have at least one foot correctly inserted.
Image: Jeff Kubina under CC BY 2.0
