Yes, no one thought it would actually ever be done, it may have taken 17 hours of driving and $60 of 'gasoline', she may have turned up at a high school exhausted and stinking from less than 4 hours sleep in a hot car, but Mummy got her cheerleading competition after all!

It was certainly worth it. The cheerleading was actually the start to a whole day of dance competitions in a place called Hemet, CA, which is a no-horse-but-many-car-showrooms kind of town near Los Angeles. I was very excited to be seeing the cheerleading, and not just because of the tiny skirts. The competing teams were actually realy quite good and did all the impressive tricks, such as throwing each other a long way into the air and landing without shattering any bones. Big burly men acted as backstops in case things went wrong then.

But as an avid fan of Bring It On (and the sequels; Here It Is and It's Been Brought), I expected all that. What was really exciting was the Spirit. Now, this concept took me a little while to grasp, but luckily some nice cheerleaders adopted us and explained it all.

Spirit is best translated as 'good karma', but in a more tabulated way. It comes in points. A squad will get Spirit Points if they do something good; cheering on a rival team, showing good sportmanship, having well-behaved family members in the audience, and whatnot. At first, it seems like a bit of a hollow concept introduced solely to stop over excited young girls getting stroppy and trying to balls things up for other teams, but there's more to it than that.

A team will also get Spirit Points (for which there are a range of trophies at the end) if they convince their fans and affiliated audience members to get involved. What better way than to annex three English girls and strongly encourage them to take part in the Audience Show, where audience members learn a routine in 30 minutes and perform it for everyone else during an interval. Turns out you get a lot of spirit points for that. It also turns out that years of CULES teach the skills of learning to approximate a dance very quickly, and to assume that you can pull of moves which normally require training simply by being enthusiastic enough.

But I'm making the cheerleaders sound very self-centred here, in their collection of Spirit. They were actually very nice people, and as a reward for being foreign but having a damn good go anyway, the 'girls from London' were each awarded a Spirit Stick by the judges. A Spirit Stick appears to be a tube of beads that you shake to generate Spirit in the area around you. It must never touch the floor, or all the spirit will get out. L has already dropped hers. But anyway, in the hope that a little bit of feel-good Spirit will rub off on you, here's a picture of me, a cheerleader, and my new Spirit Stick!

Originally published at Where Is Greg?.