I'm becoming a walking cliche. Or should I say dancing cliche. My friend Andrew and I used to go to a sweaty dance hall together every week until life got difficult and neither of us felt much like dancing. But now my daughter, newly returned from France, has dragged me back there.
And so we shuffle in to the familiar back room of a bar in Chiswick High Street where a photograph of Al Murray leers at us from the brick walls and a short man in a headscarf, tied pirate-style, is wiggling up the middle of the floor holding the hand of a tall muscled guy with a shaved head who then turns neatly underneath his arm then sweeps the man in a headscarf into a dip. Welcome to Salsa dancing.
Nothing much has changed in a year. The guy with the muscles is a naked chef who makes his living being hired out for novelty dinner parties where he cooks wearing only an apron. It must surely be against Health & Safety, but I don't suppose the people who employ him really care about hygiene. He's also a Hip Hop dancer and goes through his salsa steps trying hard not to grab his crotch. As the roof fills up I recognise lots of other faces, including my son's old physics teacher and around about a dozen white, middle class, middle aged men who dance as though they were doing really skilled DIY and can't take their eyes off their task to talk to you in case the drill slips. Sometimes I really wish the drill would slip. That conceited, white-man overbite is not something you want to spend too much time contemplating - but you have to watch their faces closely while you dance to try and figure out what they want you to do. In my case that would be to disappear.
I do a beginners class to keep my daughter company - I am pleased to see I am neither the fattest nor the oldest. There's even a woman of about 65 wearing pearls. The warm-up involves moving in a circle while grinding your hips with bent knees like you're scantily clad and starring in a rap video - but with West London housewives in twin sets. I want to die. This is something no kid ever needs to see. I imagine my own 1950s apron-clad mother standing on a dance floor shaking her shoulders and swinging her hips to Reggaeton. It should get you on the Child Protection Register. Nevertheless I do the steps, and try not to catch my daughter's eye. It's not difficult. She's looking at the floor waiting for it to swallow her up.
This music's Reggaeton, she slides up to me and hisses in my ear.
I know.
How do you know? She's mystified.
We did classes last year when Andrew and I went to Lille (and yes, reader, I admit - it was for a Salsa weekend - once upon a time we were that keen).
Mother! What? You did Reggaeton?
No, I did a class - I didn't say I could do it.
Mercifully the music ends. Then it's time for the three scariest words in the English language . If you were lucky enough not to go to a Scottish Primary school in the seventies you probably don't get the awful flashbacks that the words 'find a partner' conjour up in a woman who began to hit her modest height when she was ten and all prospective partners looked like tiny Subuteo players with their shirts tucked into their gym shorts, except that their feet didn't rock from side to side. No, instead they dragged. Especially at partner picking time. Nor were there enough boys to go round. I was tall. You can guess the rest. It's a mystery why I still like dancing. By rights, a decade of The Gay Gordons and Canadian Barn Dances being a boy, dancing with the girl nobody else picked should have traumatised me for life. Instead, there I am thirty odd years later still paired up with a man who comes up to my chest who I could snap like a twig between my thighs, but at least this time around, I don't have to lead.
That's the theory anyway.
'This is one time when you ladies don't have any free will.' says the instructor - a russet-haired girl in a crop top who has obviously never married or had small children if she thinks we don't understand that concept. 'You may not do anything unless the man lets you. You cannot move unless the man tells you to.' It sounds like Islam. ' Now men, you have to lead. You have to be masterful and let your partner know what you want from her.'
Huh. If only. Be still my beating heart. I can't tell if it's from excitement or exertion.
The men, a motley crew ranging from the very, very tall bespectacled, round shouldered shy ones who've come for a laugh instead of going to the pub to watch football (so possibly are also gay) to the octogenarian with a huge stomach spilling over his belted trousers that looks like the bulge of West Africa, laugh nervously.
Exertion, then.
Another who I will soon discover is Dutch and very nimble despite being egg shaped and about five feet tall, has wonderfully cold hands having nabbed the prize spot under the air conditioner, while yet another has obligatory chest hair, blinding white teeth, and has been dancing for three weeks so thinks he's super-hot stuff. He tells me I should take smaller steps as he whacks me in the chest with his elbow for the fifth time. I smile and tell him if he does that once more I will take a big step right between his legs.
'Men,' the instructor entreats, 'You can expect the ladies to run around you in a circle - you're not training ponies. You have to hold them closer. Salsa is all about body contact.' Half the room recoils - the half wearing deodorant. 'You need to wash, slap on some Right Guard guys, wear cologne, gargle, chew gum, brush your teeth - the whole works - and then pull the woman close. I'm minty-fresh, wearing Joy at 145 quid for 15ml, and so I hope I've passed the fragrance test. The man I'm dancing with, a sweet-faced Asian chap with a tonsure, a comb-over, and clammy hands, smiles shyly and continues to hold me a foot away as he swings me round. I might as well have bells on my harness, and be trotting round a ring at the end of a leading reign.
Eventually I work my way round to the physics teacher.
'I haven't seen you here for ages,' he says looking straight into my eyes with his own piercing blue ones as, for three blessed minutes, we are perfectly in synch and I can follow his lead, rarely losing eye contact, as he sweeps me into a serpentine hold and spins me out again. He asks after my son. I tell him he's at university now. We cross body turn into a copa.
'Stick your hips out ladies,' yells the instructor. Ah well, that's never been a problem for me. 'Hands on the waist men, not on the ribcage, not on the bum, not on the thighs, the waist, the waist!' She crosses the room and removes a plate-sized fist from a shoulder and pulls it firmly down. 'Don't you have any idea of anatomy?' She shakes her head in disbelief.
The physics teacher and I are dancing blithely on, eyes locked, his fingertips pressed on my back pulling me right up against him as we pivot twice without missing a beat. He probably did biology and chemistry A level. He definitely knows exactly where to put his hands.
Unfortunately, he also has a boyfriend called Frank.
