Went to Meta 9. T'was very good, but the decor was not quite as good as last year's -- more inventive, but less practical. In particular, enclosing the marketplace in a big cloth tent was a very poor idea, having the effect of enclosing several hundred glowstick-waving punters into one big hothouse. But otherwise fab, and the VIP bit was both relaxing and a good way to avoid the evil queues for things. Thanks to Steve and Giles for the invitations and general persuasion.

In other news, my gym has apparently just started a class on Thursdays called Body Jam which is a combined aerobic workout / dance lesson. This being ideally suited to a gym-going disco-geek such as myself, I tried it out. It was -- unsurprisingly -- a room full of women and three gay men (including me), but it was great fun, and massively tiring, and I ended up using all sorts of muscles I don't usually use -- so that, combined with Meta yesterday, has left all the muscles in my torso completely locked up, and I am unable to bend/walk/sit/lie down/breathe in without painful acheyness. But it will pass, and then I will be stronger.

The only slightly annoying thing about the class was the way the instructors demonstrated the routines. The class consists of maybe five or six of these routines, each to a different song (apparently mixed especially for this kind of activity). Both instructors are fairly obviously professional backup-type dancers earning some extra money on the side, and they demonstrated routines by explaining what we had to do, but using what I can only assume are technical terms used by choreographers: "three sashays forward, two back, mambo left, mambo right, cha-cha-cha backwards, pump twice..." and so on. Since this mystified the class every time, they usually resorted to demonstrating phyiscally what to do, which was much better, except that they tended to do so while facing the class. My internal 3D mirroring capabilities are apparently not quite up to the frame rate required to follow a fast-moving demon-woman in yellow lycra, so I frequently found myself doing everything in the opposite direction to the rest of the class, which was embarrassing. But I was certainly not the least co-ordinated person there, so not so embarrassing that I won't go again. I have already decided to go to Body Jam next week.

Finally, huge glad-you're-better hugs to Dan, who managed to come down with mumps.