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I was delighted several months ago to receive the invitation to once again represent Canary Wharf in the Lord Mayor’s Show. This would involve finding a group of 20 skaters, organising rehearsals, choreographing and teaching 4 music tracks of synchronised, dance skating and finally performing at the parade in front of thousands of spectators and appearing on Live BBC coverage.

Clare Balding will present the live coverage of the celebrated event at London’s Mansion House, where the traditional procession will lead the newly elected mayor – the 682nd to hold the position – on his way to pledge allegiance to the Crown in a ceremony dating back 800 years. Commentary is provided by Paul Dickenson.

We will be skating to 4 different songs, each with a different choreography and the songs will loop over and over for the duration of the parade. The songs we will be skating to are;

Lady Gaga – Poker Face

Michael Jackson – Billie Jean

Black Eyed Peas – Boom Boom Pow

Slum Dog Millionaire – JaiHo

The routines have to be simple, easy to learn and visually interesting so that we attract attention to our float. The potential difficulties we may encounter include the possibility of rain (which happened in abundance last year), dodging horse poop from the horses ahead of us in the parade, having to do our routines over rough London street surfaces with man hole covers etc and also variable speeds that we have no control over as we simply have to follow the parade. However we are prepared to be flexile and to be spontaneous on the day.

After some initial hiccups with the costumes which only arrived a week before the event and were all too small (one size does not fit all), we are now nearly ready and are just hoping for a fine day with no rain.