Last week we used the Christmas voucher the kids had bought Paul for the National Video Game Museum. I’ll be honest I wasn’t overly excited – I’d have preferred the art gallery and a nice sit down after – but we haven’t done anything like that as a family for a while and everyone else loves computer games so I braced myself.

Apart from the fact that the first 2 hours were insanely busy, I actually really enjoyed it. I was terrible at most things, especially anything that required coordination or shooting things. But there are a few machines that have queues and I did the useful Mum thing and waited in line for them while the others darted about pressing buttons. My favourite popular game was the dance machine.

When Paul and I were in our mid twenties we spent an awful lot of time playing on a playstation dance mat in our living room with our friends. H and I got pretty flippin good at it. The songs were terrible and mostly made for the game apart from “Video Killed the Radio Star”. When I stepped on the machine and heard it playing “Keep On Keep On Keep On Keep On Moving” I shot back in time in my head. Unfortunately the memory didn’t translate to my feet which seemed to have never played the game before. When the song finished I was hot, out of breath and a touch mortified that there were people in a queue behind me watching – but I had been transported. We’ve had a variety of different movement related games since, but nothing has come close to the mat with the crunchy centre and the slippery surface that meant you often didn’t end up where you started (and not where you thought you were), and that you had to stamp so hard on that the floorboards moved. That’s still the one for me. We even had two side by side so we could compete against each other – such dancing dweebs. But a super happy part of my life.

While I reminisce on WordPress, I can hear my kids doing German homework in the kitchen, working out sentences about health and fitness. Specifically they seem to have come up with “My sister is lazy and is now in hospital”. I genuinely think dance mats could make a comeback for anyone with a big enough living room, so I might suggest they now translate “when she comes out of hospital she will get a Playstation dance mat from the noughties to get some exercise”.