WHEN I WAS 8, I took up ballroom dancing. I spotted a pair of silver sandals in my friend Joanne’s bedroom and was told that they were essential kit for dance classes. I had been looking for a way to escape my brown Start-rite T-bars and here it was.
My mother smiled bravely when I announced what I would like to do. “But you’ve got your violin and swimming,” she said, “surely that’s enough?” A couple of weeks later, there I was dancing the pasa doble to Viva España in a run-down hall above some shops. The highlight of each class came when either Jolene or Ken, owners of the dance school, would interrupt my dance to guide me expertly around the floor. But after a year of this I gave up, partly because I liked giving things up, and partly because Jolene and Ken began putting pressure on my mother to pay for private lessons. “Oh, but she already has the violin,” she said firmly. So I left. My friend Joanne took the private lessons and acquired a scarlet chiffon dress with sequined skirt. I got a long, shapeless skirt for the local schools’ orchestra.
It was another 18 years before I was able to sweep around a ballroom again. The film Strictly Ballroom had come out, and somehow a dozen of us ended up at a party in a London hotel. I was in a state of catatonic gloom, having just come out of a relationship, waking in the night to howl into my pillow. But a friend persuaded me that I should pair up with Adam, a lapsed evangelical Christian who was now sowing his wild oats. “He’s a very good dancer,” the friend reassured me when I looked appalled by this thumbnail sketch.
Whatever dire religious persecution Adam had been subjected to in his childhood, he had also been packed off to dance classes (probably more traumatic than hellfire at the time). But it was all coming good now. As the other men in our group shambled about treading on toes, rushing steps and missing beats, I felt Adam’s hand slip into the small of my back, and his hip bone lean decisively into mine. Having written him off as a strange, quiet cypher of a man, I was now taking my orders from him, twisting, turning and gliding at his behest. His hands, hips and feet were engaged in intimate conversation with my own, becoming more responsive to one another with each dance.
Just the right amount of sweat appeared on his forehead — I know this because his cheek gradually moved next to mine. Around this time, a thought occurred to me: if we had this physical simpático on the dance-floor, imagine what would be possible on a softer surface in a more private place. He possessed a competence, a physical decisiveness, that was very, very attractive. It was still attractive at three in the morning when we had found that softer surface.
Advertisement
It didn’t last, and to be honest I’d forgotten the whole thing — until, oh joy, oh bliss, Strictly Come Dancing came to the BBC this spring, making an unlikely star of the newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky, and resurrecting Bruce Forsyth like some moth-eaten Lazarus of Light Entertainment. (According to The Sun, Verona Joseph, of Holby City, has fared less well, experiencing panic and fainting attacks whenever the pasa doble looms.) It is with a programme like Strictly Come Dancing that the Reithian ideals of public service broadcasting really come into their own: here is a show that could rescue ballroom dancing from the taloned clutches of peroxide obsessives in sequins, and return it to us, the deserving middle classes.
We hear a lot about feckless underclass males who are good for nothing very much, but not a lot is said about the sheer ineffectuality of many “socially responsible” British men. They can dress, they know their chardonnay from their pinot grigio, they can bore for England about the stock market. But can they make a decision? Can they take control? Are they — let’s be blunt here — any good in bed? Only if you take the plunge and have an actual relationship with them do you get to find out. Unless you can persuade them to take up ballroom dancing.
It is on the dance-floor that a man’s true nature is revealed. Does he pretend to take control while leaving you to make all the moves, dragging him round and gritting your teeth as you resist digging a heel into his toe? Does he rush things, skipping beats, feverishly moving on to the twirl when the last manoeuvre is not complete? Does he run through the same moves over and over again, seeming not remotely cast down by the monotony of it all? If you have discovered this, you can make a run for the door without getting into the whole duvet-and-borrowed-toothbrush scenario. If, on the other hand, he can handle you on the dance-floor, he can probably handle you anywhere.