Haddenham Jazzercise Class Now Entering World Breakdancing Championships

The Thursday jazzercise class at the village hall has stopped being a class. It is now a crew, it has a hand signal, it has a rule about who gets the middle, and it has decided, without consulting anybody, that it is going to the world breakdancing championships.

It began during the grapevine, the bit of the hour where everybody moves sideways and thinks about nothing in particular. A woman at the front went down onto one hand and did not get up. Then she went round. Properly round, twice, legs out, trainers describing a circle at head height, while the stereo played something with a saxophone in it. Nobody knew the etiquette, so they clapped, which is how most things in this village become permanent.

The crew is six. Valerie, 72, has the windmill, because she has, in her words, no cartilage left to protect and nothing to lose. A retired payroll supervisor does a Robot with the grim exactness of a woman who will not be hurried. A man called Gordon only does the freeze and holds it until the room stops enjoying it. Two sisters from Aston Road do everything in unison and refuse to be separated even in the car.

They started touring to get match fit. Chinnor came over on a wet Tuesday and were beaten in front of forty people and a tea urn, chiefly because the Chinnor anchor attempted a headspin on a hall floor with a rug on it. Thame was harder. The hall near Thame has a sprung section, and the crew came home describing the surface as disrespectful and the judging as Thame all over. They travel in two cars and an estate, and they bring their own lino.

Long Crendon is the rivalry now. The two pensioners battled in September in front of the serving hatch, agreed terms beforehand (no leaning on the stage, one go each, no music with words in it), and Valerie went first and did the windmill for what witnesses put at a long time. The Long Crendon woman answered with a backspin she had apparently been sitting on since the summer, got most of the way round, and stopped against a stack of chairs. A man holding a raffle drum called it a draw, and neither of them accepts it.

The parish council, which has a booking form and an unshakeable faith in that form, has been asked to reclassify the Thursday slot from keep fit to competitive floor dance, on the grounds that Valerie needs a run up of roughly the length of the hall. A councillor replied that the form offers badminton, yoga or other. The crew has formally become other, and has had it printed on the back of a fleece.

"We came for the cardio and we found a calling," said Denise Rowbotham, 61, a retired supervisor from Churchway who spins on her back now and did not before. "We are aware of the world championship. We are not afraid of it, and neither is Long Crendon, which is the problem." Your correspondent asked, gently, whether anybody had looked up how you enter, and was told that was exactly the sort of question the old class would have asked. Three of them then stayed on in the car park under the one working light, taking turns at the windmill while Valerie counted them in, watched by a man with a spaniel who will not be able to explain it at home.