I have an Excel spreadsheet with ballet grades, the hours each one takes, and how long it’ll take me to achieve each grade. I have a tab that has all the hours of ballet (and violin and piano) that I’ve taken.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about ballet and how long it’ll take me to reach a level where I can take RAD Intermediate Foundation exams. You should know that I adore ballet, and my goal is to go en pointe. I’ve had ballet dreams since I was 21 years old, and I’m now approaching 40!

I wanted to join graded RAD classes, but I couldn’t find any for adults, and I’m not looking to study with children! I deepened my search and managed to find a few schools that offer Grade 6, but then comes my issue. I hate leaving the house! That’s why I’ve barely got anywhere with my ballet dreams. I started to look for online graded RAD classes, and guess what? I found a school! It’s in Australia, and my first class is tomorrow! It’s $50AUD/month, which works out as under £9/class (can’t forget to include international fees in that cost).

The class, however, is in their evening, which makes it 7:30 in the morning. So early! Get this, the next day, the class is at 12:00 noon their time, 1:30 my time! But to be fair, I’m always awake at that time anyway. It’s the 7:30 timeslot, which will be a chore.

So I’ll be doing Grades 3, 4, and 5. Two one-hour classes on Wednesday and one one-hour class on Thursday, so three hours of group ballet classes a week. Plus, I’m in talks with a private ballet teacher to have lessons once a week for an hour. She teaches the Vaganova method, so classes should be quite technical.

I always have these thoughts of being ‘serious about it now’, but I think this is it.

I’ll let you know how the class goes tomorrow!

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