My first leave-home, eat-out trip since the Covid landings a year ago, was shakshuka in the East End, on the terrace at Poplar Union, the busy community arts centre. I sat with G overlooking the newly re-opened Bartlett Park, fringed in the not-so-far distance by the silver towers of Canary Wharf.

We sat out in the fresh air, listening to the occasional roar from the ‘whispering’ jets leaving City Airport, but, right there in the park, were the richer sounds of children enjoying the brand-new playground (with a man in Rescue water-wings patrolling the adjacent waters of the Limehouse Cut). We sat until overcome by an unexpected deluge. We hurried for cover like everyone else – most people laughing, the day’s good mood not yet broken by this sudden intervention of dark skies and the fiercest rain.

On 25 July 2019, I danced here at the Union in Danielle Jones (Teale)’s contemporary company of Dancers with Parkinson’s. After several weeks devising an original programme, we performed to an invited audience of about seventy five. There’s a short film online.

It made sense to me that expressing dismay at losing my mobility to a nasty brain disease, should use the language of movement itself. Explaining that you can’t walk straight any more, is more convincing illustrated as a doddery wobble across the floor, than in any number of spoken words (these get taken too).

There’s a chance I’ll be back here later this year for a second go. Preparations have begun. In the midst of the pandemic, money has been found and Zoom video-rehearsals are underway. But today is simply for pleasure, so I’m not looking ahead. As G and I reach shelter, we’re still in a happy mood. While she tries to capture on her photo-phone the atmosphere of stormy drama through the window, I listen to the beat of the storm, the sound of rain on granite paving. It makes a sort of flamenco clapping. Now there’s an idea.

(C) Danielle Jones (Teale) Dance, Collective IDentity, written by Leslie Mapp.