best for REAL LIFE
Move over, Posh & Becks!
When Joan O’Shaughnessy posted a video of her and hubby Jimmy dancing, she never expected what it would lead to…
My hubby Jimmy and I swayed together in time to the music.
Islands in the stream, that is what we are…
In front of us in our dining room, my phone balanced on a tripod, videoing us. We were copying a scene from the Netflix documentary, Beckham, where David and Victoria swayed together to the Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers classic.
‘Our followers are going to love this,’ I grinned.
I posted the video on our TikTok and Instagram accounts, and within hours our feed was alive with comments from our followers. They loved it!
Have to admit, this is better than the Beckhams, someone wrote.
Then, about a fortnight later, I got a notification that made my jaw drop. David Beckham himself had shared our video on his Instagram stories!
Soon, 3.7 million people had watched that video on TikTok and
If there’s one thing I’ve learned
10.1 million on Instagram – but that wasn’t unusual for me and Jimmy, 71. We have a staggering four million TikTok followers who regularly tune in to watch reels of us dancing.
Despite being in our 70s, we’ve become what the younger generation call ‘influencers’ – we even get free holidays and cruises, as well as being paid to film sponsored ads.
It’s a far cry from when we first started dancing together over five decades ago…
I met Jimmy in a Liverpool nightclub in 1970 when I was 16. Me and a friend were mad about Motown and soul and used to sneak in to dance to the live bands.
My pal was dating one of Jimmy’s mates, and another boy had his eye on me. We’d stepped out a couple of times, but he had no sense of rhythm.
Jimmy, on the other hand… now there was a boy who could dance. Snappy dresser, too.
After dancing together that night, Jimmy walked me to the bus stop.
On the way, we passed a girl sitting on a doorstep in tears. She’d wanted to go out with Jimmy! Turns out all the girls were after him.
He took me to a disco on board a Mersey cruise called the Royal Iris, where we danced the night away.
Within three months he’d given me a ring with my birthstone, an opal. I began wearing it on the third finger of my right hand… but we both knew it was really meant for my left hand. We were only 19 and 20 when we got married in 1973. We didn’t actually have a first dance at our wedding because it was only a small ceremony – we’d just bought our first house together, so we ploughed all our money into that.
For the first nine years of our marriage, it was just the two of us and we were always out club
