One of my early memories when there was just me, was of my mother taking me round to visit her friend who had three sons, a livelier household than ours and I was especially excited when the boys said we were allowed to jump on the settee. It was great fun until their mother walked in the room and told them off, followed by mother who of course told me off.

With the advent of garden trampolines perhaps children don’t jump on beds anymore, but for most of us that is the first introduction to trampolining. At this point I should add that there was plenty of fun and exercise to be had at our flat as Dad had built me a miracle of carpentry and engineering; a rocking horse that was a small scale version of the ones in the park.  By the time we had a house with a garden and I had a brother, sister and a friend round the corner with a big family, the two dads had built us everything from Wendy houses to climbing frames. Plenty of play, but no bouncing.

My first opportunity to go on a real trampoline came in first year high school in Australia; a girls’ camp where the trampoline was the lure to come on a  Christian holiday in the lovely Darling Ranges. A week that inspired Jenny’s school trip in my novel Quarter Acre Block.

I never mastered a somersault and we returned to the boredom of softball, netball and PE at school until a new Phys-ed teacher arrived from England. He had floppy blonde hair, reminded us of  Illya Kuryakin from The Man From Uncle and we all wanted to be in his class. He taught us fun things like Jujitsu and using a ‘trampette’ to leap over the wooden horse. Then he moved on to another school.

Forward a good few years and at the local sports centre Popmobility classes started two evenings a week, very addictive, followed by a new Ladies’ Leisure Morning complete with crèche. At last we could have a go on the big trampolines we had looked at enviously when we took our children to classes. There was also roller skating at weekends to which children were allowed to bring an adult. If you’re enjoying something it usually doesn’t last, classes get cancelled, buildings close and line dancing went the same way as the other activities.

We then belonged to various leisure clubs with pools, Jacuzzis and gyms, ranging from fantastically smart and too expensive to cheap and dire. When we moved I discovered Aquarobics. It was great fun and exercised the parts swimming didn’t reach, but the local hotels and council pools lost teachers and closed classes at regular intervals. By the time the water dried up I had missed the Zumba craze and avoided Yoga and Pilates as too serious. When I read on Facebook about  Boogie Bounce with Mel above our Sainsbury’s Local on a Monday morning, it sounded too handy to be missed.  We each have a little round trampoline of the sort children used to have till the giant garden types appeared. Like any exercise class you get out of it according to the effort put in, but bouncing around is more fun than circuits of the gym and every part gets stretched. It is like Aquarobics without the water and your brain also gets exercise as you try to follow the routine. It’s always good for writers to have an antidote to sitting at the computer, but don’t think of new ideas for the plot of your novel as you are exercising; you are bound to lose concentration on the routine and get your legs and arms in a  tangle.