Saturday morning at my children’s gymnastics class. Cold wooden floor. Their voices and the teacher’s bounce around the hall, reverberant reflections underpinned by rhythmic footsteps soon to launch somersaults across worn blue mats. Closer to me a wall heater rattles, other parents talk to one another,a phone call is made and the pages of a ‘true lives’ women’s weekly are turned.
A slight draft blows through the hall’s open door and makes small piles of grey dust and lint perform circular dances along the edges and in corners of the room. Through the windows a grey squinty light is making the climbing ladders a block of black squares as the class and morning slowly clop along.