We’re just back from Jive Addiction’s Metropolis in Manchester, gutted that we couldn’t stay til tomorrow, unfortunately work and the kids beckon.

We arrived Friday lunchtime after a very easy journey from North London and headed straight for the bar for Mojito’s and a catch up with Underpar, John & Co. The cocktails at The Palace Hotel are rather delicious, I could have stayed there all afternoon just chatting and drinking, but the sensible person inside me stopped at two drinks and headed off to check in.

Our room was newly decorated, clean, warm with plenty of room and very high ceilings.

We’d opted for the half board option as we really enjoyed the food last year and we weren’t disappointed this year either. The food was really quite fabulous again and the staff friendly, enthusiastic and Mancunian. Nice to hear a regional accent and be able to have a conversation with the waitress rather than the usual you get in big city hotels.

Copper Faced Jacks – The new blues room. So much better than last years Buckingham Suite. Copper Faced Jacks is a dingy bar in the basement of the hotel with lovely wooden floors and had as good an atmosphere as any blues room I’ve been in before. The Buckingham suite here and Jacks in Butlins were just too big to be blues rooms, but CFJ’s was just about perfect. It’s funny how rooms seem to sort themselves out very quickly then stay that was for the whole weekend. It was a bit like Southport in that the teachers and their groupies all hung around the bar and everyone else over by the DJ stand. It seemed to suit everyone well as there was room at the bar for flashy moves and floor hogging away from everyone else. Very civilised, in fact.

The Ballroom – Much the same as last year, great atmosphere, really busy but not over crowded. I stumbled a few times with the uneven floor, but John (who never seems to stop working) spend a lot of the weekend ensuring that the floor was as level as possible.

Classes

We did 4 classes in total;

Six Beat Swing with Adam & Tas – This was a great class which taught six beat lindy moves that you can easily integrate into your modern jive repertoire. Adam and Tas were really lovely. As me and Gav have done plenty of Lindy already Adam and Tas were kind enough to spent 5 minutes with us at the end of the class showing us an 8 count swing-out variation that we hadn’t seen before, we were very happy to get a “bonus move”.

Polishing your Basic’s with Mikey & Heidi – This class took simple basic moves such as First Move, Basket and Catapult and put some user friendly variations in. Mikey’s philosophy on dancing is “Keep it simple but give your basic moves a little je ne sais quoi” and I think he’s spot on. I really enjoyed this class and Mickey is down to earth and very witty. I learnt (re-learnt, actually) so much from this class and really noticed a difference in my freestyle dancing that evening.

Latin Jive with H & Kim – These teachers were new to us and we fancied giving this class a go. Some nice Modern Jive moves with some mambo and cha cha cha’s thrown in. This was my favourite class of the weekend and I’m looking forward to trying these moves out and having something different to do on the dancefloor.

Charleston Stroll with Tas – I thought I might know this one as I have learnt quite a few strolls over the last few years at Lindy events here and there, but this one was new to me – so much fun! Everyone loved it and left the room feeling happy and like they’d had a good workout, perfect to burn off a few of the millions of calories I’ve had over the weekend.

DJ’s

Top DJ of the Weekend award goes to – Pete Flood. His set in the blues room on Saturday night was fabulous! Plenty of soulful and funky tracks, right up my street. Brilliant!

The niggly bits

Gav was ill all weekend and spent most of it sleeping. The silver lining to this was that when he went to bed early on Friday night, I spent a whole 2 hours being asked to dance lots. Men just don’t ask when I’m sitting with Gav, why is that?

The floor in the main room was a bit of a drag, but I didn’t spend much time in there so not a major complaint.

I knew about 10 people out of the hundreds of dancers that were there. I networked a bit and got chatting to a few new folk, but there was a lack of familiar faces. I like to go to weekenders where I know lots of people, I dunno why, it’s just comforting to catch up with weekend acquaintances from weekenders past. Has everyone else defaulted to Southport?

Really glad we went though, we had a lovely relaxing weekend, a bit of dancing, a few lessons, great food and drinks. John, as always, worked tirelessly to ensure everyone had the best weekend possible. It’s not surprising that Hemsbey in June is already sold out & I’m annoyed with myself for not booking earlier. We’re putting ourselves on the reserve list and hoping for a cancellation as we just know we’ll be missing out on something special if we don’t go.

Thanks to John and The Jive Addiction crew for another great weekend.