So two, unrelated things that happened tonight.
I was dancing in my favourite club, Kelso.
It’s just a bar with a dance floor and a DJ on weekends. I like it because on a good night, the DJs are good and on a great night, they play the full version of Donna Summer and Georgio Moroder’s “I Feel Love”. I was 8 when the original was released, but for all the transformative music styles that have occurred in my lifetime, electro-disco is the big one.
Tonight, my favourite DJs weren’t there but the music was good. Earlier today our first cricket match of the season had ended in an astonishing one-run victory, and I was in a super-giddy mood already. I walked in, found a corner and started dancing. To myself. Feeling the groove and making the moves that I’ve made since I was a teenager at house parties.
You know: no-one teaches you how to dance these days, and our parents wouldn’t recognise it as dancing, since in their day it was part social skill and majorly the way to pull.
I dance quite a lot at work. And on the walk home. I say dancing: it’s syncopated movement, even if it’s to a tune that’s only playing in my feet.
I was dancing, with my eyes closed; my body feeling way more at home than it did for three hours running around a cricket pitch hours earlier.
And then it started.
*guy taps me on the arm*
“Mate: I love your dancing”
“Thank you” (big, slightly awkward smile)
My buzz burst.
Then another:
*tap* “Nice moves”
To be honest, it wasn’t “I feel love”, so I know I’ll recover.
And another:
“Mate, mate: nice moves”.
Twice more in five minutes I get different blokes telling me that they’re enjoying my dancing. My suspicion is that they’re being sarcastic, but if they are, I don’t care: that makes them twits, not me.
But it totally ends my relationship with the music tonight. I’m done. I look across the dance floor and it feels like there are more people who have come to watch dancing as to dance. Mostly they are not there to look at me, I’m guessing it’s mostly at the women. Would be creepy either way.
So I go talk to my work colleague. She’s not dancing and is out with a pal. I complain about the dance floor.
Her friend asks me whether she can have a selfie with me. My hair is unfashionably mad, and she is 6ft plus tall, so there are two reasons why she might want a photo with me, and either is fine, to be honest.
I don’t see the photo, but I’m sure it will be OK because it is just a photo and because we do get better at posing for selfies the more we do. Imagine sending off your roll of film and waiting on the post to tell you that your duck-pout was ok. Madness.
I head downstairs for one last attempt to lose myself in dance again, but people want to dance like me and that’s not the point.
Also, and for the second time tonight, I’ve put my fresh pint of dancing lager down on a ledge right next to me and when The interruptions finally cause me to give up and I go to take a sip, one of the glass collectors has already swiped it. It will have been full and frosty and not like an abandoned beer. The evening is closing around me. I head upstairs just to say bye to my gang.
I then find from my colleague, and apropos of nothing, that the tall woman has been single for a while and that every bloke she gets in touch with sends her a picture of his member as the “third text” of their communication and that that has proved problematic in finding a new mate.
Which brings us up to date. It turns out that the patten is: first text: contact made. Second text: small talk. Third text: an actual picture of a penis.
Now: I’ve not dated in the internet era. By which I mean, my last courtship was with the woman who turned out to be my wife (though I only found that out when we got married) but we didn’t even email since we were in the same town.
And I’m pretty certain that, had my third interaction with her been a photograph of my old chap, then she’d have:
A: asked why I’d sent her a photo
B: asked why it was a photo of Arthur Askey*, specifically
C: Called an ambulance to come and stitch her sides back together
Why? Why would men send a stranger a photograph of their spam javelin^? And apparently with sufficient frequency that this is a thing. What’s the response that it’s meant to elicit?
I never got to ask the tall woman what she thought it was about: maybe it was something she was doing.
Anyway: how was your evening?
* one for the kids there. Wikipedia him.
^ yeah: that. Don’t bother looking it up
Try not to lick it 