[dancing] tripping the light fantastic

Quite frankly, I detest dancing.

Let me make that a bit clearer. I love dance - good dance is wonderful to behold and the way those men and women can move, especially on ice, is breathtaking. Torville and Dean were two of my favourites.

I'd love to be able to step onto the dance floor , stride up to the loveliest woman and then transport her around the room on light feet, never once stepping on her toes. I almost did this in Second Life. Alas, that is the virtual world.

Looking through history, it was never a question, pre-war, so I believe. One supposedly learnt to dance. One learnt to foxtrot and tango to tolerable levels [today that's moved on to the Salsa] and the waltz was a piece of cake. The days of dancing lessons really died out towards the end of my youth and though I was taught the moves, they were never later utilized.

Where the average girl will start gyrating the hips to the strains of the latest song, we just tap our feet and nod in time, then go out and kick a football round or bounce a basketball and slam-dunk it. For the average girl, on the other hand, dancing is in the soul, in the physionomy - she's done it since two years of age. She knows all the moves. She feels the dance inside her.

Therein lies the problem.

There are so few guys for whom dancing is more than piston-pumping arms and feet two-square on the floor, drink in hand. For them, clubbing is just the scene, the girls, the atmosphere, the beat, the rhythm. A proportion realize it's much more and adore it.

I honestly think there should be a medal awarded to any mother who gently guides her young son into dance so that by the time he needs it, he's a natural.

Scene

Our hotel in Tenerife some years back. My girl is an accomplished dancer in the "knows-all-the-moves" tradition. Everything, right down to the moonlight, has been custom-ordered for the evening. A flamenco show of great skill gives way to the guests pouring onto the terrace looking out over the sea and what are we going to do?

I feel trapped. Hers, I know full-well, is club dancing and at home, she puts on some music and immediately breaks into dance. Mine is the move-swiftly-on-the-feet-and-hope-for-the-best variety. I haven't danced for years.

I hate it.

You see, years earlier a particularly obnoxious woman, not even my own partner, laughed at my two left feet and at the time I'd wanted to say:

"Yeah, well can you spin a rugby ball vertically over ten metres and land it two metres in front of your fly half or glide through the pack over the gain line? Can you tackle a man four stone heavier and bring him down? Can you score a basket 7 times out of 10?"

We only do well at those things we practise and we only practise that which we love and we only love that which we do well. That which we know we're not adept at - we shy away from.

I'd shied away until this night. Some woman thinks I'm a klutz? OK - that's the end for me. Never mind that I once went to a dance party and danced with almost every girl there. I'm a klutz with two left feet and my current partner this night shows this in her eyes.

So the horror begins and I do what I can. She's doing all these fabulous moves and I'm meant to stand a metre and a half away in this stupid modern manner and do mine. Except I don't have any moves, so I have to make some up but we're not dancing together - she's for her and I'm what I can be.

I hate it.

Then comes a slow number and I'm back in business. With physical contact again I can guide her a little, use the body, I feel lighter on the feet, she suggests this with her body and we try it, I suggest that. It almost works and she's intoxicating me.

I love it.

Back to the fast number and hell begins again and I'm sick of it. I steer her to the side and go and get some drinks. An old, wizened and yet debonaire twinkle-toed Spaniard moves up and compliments the two of us on our dancing.

Yes? Truly? A small smile breaks out on the Higham visage because we'd been watching his partner and him earlier and they were mighty good for that age.

Back with my partner I tell her what he'd said and she laughs sardonically. So we go through with it until the wee hours and then the walk on the shore and the moonlight and the rest of the night I'm on safe ground with.

Next day I look back on the night with relief that the situation was somehow recovered afterwards with the aid of the moon and the shore but as for that horrid modern metre-and-a-half distant, chemistry killing so-called "dancing" - I secretly resolve never to dance again.

And I never have since that night.