Arnica and Beyond!

For just over a  year I’ve been learning to jive. Usually I go to a class in Central London on a Tuesday. This week I spotted a guy that I’d only seen a couple of times before, at a different venue, last summer.

The first thing I’d noticed about him was his huge smile. No surprise that he was great fun to dance with, despite the fact he had an equally huge bandage on his thumb.

This might sound obvious, but hands are used a lot by men that jive. They have to ‘lead’ the woman into every move, and the more skilled the lead, the more the dance will flow. Thumbs aren’t used much, but they are close to the action, so to speak. To have any injury is an inconvenience for the serious social dancer, so an injured thumb is really not great.

Anyway, we danced, and I didn’t see him again until we were waiting for the same train at the end of the evening. We chatted all the way back to East London (he had even further to travel than me) and he told me the story of his thumb. He had injured it at work, losing part of his nail, and it was very badly bruised and swollen. He’d had it X-rayed but nothing was broken. It was taking a long time to heal.

He hadn’t heard of Arnica when I asked him, but was interested when I mentioned that it could reduce healing time by around one-third. I seem to recollect spelling the name for him a couple of times and telling him where to find it and how to take it.

To be honest, this conversation wasn’t uppermost in my mind when he turned up on Tuesday. I recognised him straight away – I never forget someone I’ve enjoyed dancing with. When I asked him for a dance, I was pretty sure he knew me, but wasn’t sure if he could ‘place’ me. It turned out that I was wrong about that.  At the end of our dance, he showed me his thumb! ‘Look, do you remember? It’s better now, thanks to the Arnica! Thanks! It really helped a lot!’

We only had a few seconds to find another dance partner and I didn’t see him again. But it really made me smile.