Captain Swing 2

A fine evening's swinging tonight. My technique is still pretty laughable, but I had a few milestone successes, including three successful attempts at remonter en arrière -- which I've never managed to land before -- and a couple of reasonable first attempts at new-to-me super-planche. I realize you probably have no idea what any of that means, and why should you? But it was nice for me.

As was another go at swinging the lovely Matt from the catcher's cradle, which was much the same as last time but, somewhat surprisingly given I haven't done any catching practice for a few weeks, a bit less painful. Perhaps I will follow up the suggestion that both Matt and the teacher Pauline have made and go along to be catcher for one of the other weeknight classes. Fun.

Oh, and it turns out that Matt is, of all things, an actuary. Naturally, I asked him how risky this whole trapeze lark was seen to be, and apparently no-one really knows -- not enough people do it to provide a statistically useful sample. Which is why, among other things, the whole Circus Space adult programme shut down for several weeks about this time last year because they couldn't find anyone to insure it.

When pressed, Matt was willing to speculate that flying is possibly more dangerous than programming a computer. (Obviously he has never used Flash.) Still, we agreed the risk was well worth it.

And Mark, one of the tumblers, who I haven't mentioned before but who was a Marching Boy way back in 1994, had a very cute friend with him. In fact, that tumbling class is just out of control these days, full of sexy boys who can pull off dazzling acrobatic stunts. Most distracting.

Uh. What was I saying?
Posted by matt at March 16, 2004 01:07 AM