"Billie Jean .... she's not my lover ..."

I have been trying (and failing) to convince Joseph that weekday mornings are for getting up, getting dressed and getting out of the front door for them to go to school and for me to go to work.

Annabel is not much trouble at all, primarily because she doesn’t wake up until you go in, open her blinds, turn on the lights, remove her covers before finally nudging her until she stirs.

Joseph however, invariably is the first to wake and gets out of bed to play quietly in his room until we awake. The problem with this though is that by the time I get out of bed, he is in the middle of whatever it is he is playing with and doesn’t want to stop in order to get washed and dressed.

And so we have - what is fast turning into – the daily explanation/moan about the morning being a time for getting on with it and not play time. In response to this, Joseph has been having a mini-hissy fit which consists of him doing a kind of break-dance, where he stamps his feet and flaps his arms about. The thing is, when he does it, he closely resembles Michael Jackson dancing, arms hitting his own shoulders, legs, privates etc and it is really funny.

The (lucky) knock on effect of this is that although I have just moaned at him to get dressed, his little dance routine makes me laugh out loud, which in turn makes him laugh and sometimes, sometimes it defuses the situation perfectly.

“Why are you laughing?” he asked me the other day after one such incident. I explained about the similarity of his dance moves to Mr Jacksons and said that I would show him on the internet what I meant.

This I duly did and he laughed along, seeing the comparisons I was making with his own “freaking out” dance each morning. One click led to another and before you know it, we are watching the Moonwalk and I turn to look at Joseph, just catching his eyes widening at the spectacle.

Before he has too much of a chance to react, I quickly type in my first memory of the moonwalk.

It is early in the year 1982 and my brother and I have just watched, completely gobsmacked, as some dude (who turns out to be Jeffrey Daniel) on Top of the Pops, has done this amazing backward walk across a dance floor and it was the most incredible thing I had ever seen (watch it here). The fact that no-one in the TOTP audience screamed their heads off at the move was equally astonishing.

My brother and I spent the rest of the evening in our parents hallway, wearing socks for maximum glide across the carpet, before we achieved what would qualify as a pretty acceptable backward walk, which eventually turned out to be called the Moonwalk.

(I’ll pick up on this event in a later post).


For now (and back in the present), Joseph turns to me, clearly amazed. “How does he do that?” He asks, laughing. “How does he do it Dad?”

“Come on”, I say. “I’ll show you”.

We go into his room (laminate floor – perfect!!), I kick off my shoes and go to the end of the room. I glance over and see him staring intently at my feet, watching to see if his Dad really can do the magic walk.

After many years of not having done it, plus the fact that my ankle has been buggered for several months now, I attempt “the walk”.

I was watching my own feet as I did it and, although my ankle screamed out half way through, I thought it was not too shabby.

I looked up at Joseph to see what he thought and laughed at what I saw.

He was still watching my feet intently as I glanced over but then looked up at me with an expression that said, “Well? Are you going to do it or not?”.

He had a point.

I pathetically mentioned that my ankle hurt before having another try which was quite obviously better as he let out a loud whoop of delight.

Which was more than Jeffrey Daniels got in 1982, right?