91Èȱ¬

Even my kindest friends wouldn't think I was designed to be a dancer. I avoid taking to the dance floor at any kind of event, and on the odd occasions I've been "persuaded" - usually after a bottle too many - the outcome is not pretty.

I was born with two left feet and no sense of rhythm, so the idea that I'd become one of Britain's "" would be on the extreme end of improbability. But it's happened, and this week I was among the delegates at a Dance Summit in the City of London alongside the likes of Arlene Phillips, Lisa Snowdon, Angela Rippon and Mark Foster.

To avoid any ambiguity, I should explain that being a Dance Champion means that we champion the cause of dance in the UK - not that we've won a prize. And in fairness there are some other people more like me in the group: our chairman is who's a successful businessman and we have colleagues from the Arts Council and the Central Council for Physical Recreation as well as some patient civil servants in attendance.

The aim is straightforward: "to inspire, enable and empower people of all ages and backgrounds to try dance" - and to help meet the national targets of getting more people involved in physical activity.

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I'm writing this from Vancouver and here in the 91Èȱ¬ office we've been kicking round some of the big issues about these Winter Olympics.

This isn't the mystery of why some newspapers still think there's , which I wrote about in comment 11 on this post.

Instead, the talking point is more the trans-Atlantic gap between perceptions of the Vancouver Games in Canada and the media reporting in the UK.

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There's nothing we Brits like talking about more than the weather, but Canadians are currently running us close. The reason: , which was blogged about on this site by my colleague Jonny Bramley.

Now, we can probably (just) rule out any snow during the Summer Games of 2012 - but the British climate should be an intriguing backdrop to our Olympics.

In previous host cities it's been predictable what the weather would be like: hot and sunny in Athens, hot and humid in Beijing. For that reason some events in 2004 and 2008 were kept away from the middle part of the day.

London can be more adventurous in its scheduling because we should avoid the extremes of other climates - but that "should" does, of course, gloss over what can kindly be described as the "varied" weather we get here.

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