To my sizzling joy I have recently taken up salsa dancing for the second time. I had forgotten how euphoric it makes you feel – mentally and physically. Mentally, it gives me that head space from a hard week’s work, and is better than any large glass of wine or absorbing film. I find it almost meditative; my mind can’t indulge in worries about the state of the back garden or if I left a semi-colon out of the recent piece I filed. The only thing whizzing is my body, which is already rewarding me for my commitment to a different kind of work out. Ole! I am also relishing this revolutionary kind of saturday night out (something which in any case I have long relinquished in favour of relaxed dinner parties with girlfriends). No, hitting the tiles on the weekend my steps are lighter and more certain. Because I know I am going to have a brilliant night and it won’t even matter if I don’t touch a gin and tonic. (Though maybe one or two won’t hurt….).
Despite this, I am struggling with one major issue. Men.
Let’s get straight to the point. How is a girl to attend salsa classes in a bar, then stay behind to practise whilst it turns into a club, if she has a football-playing, salsa-phobic boyfriend back home? In the ten days since I have launched myself back into the underground Latino bars of London, I have twice been asked for my number after one dance and once had to dodge someone’s puckered lips; Sweaty man with goatee: “Will I see you later?”, moi: “Um, perhaps?”, man: “Can I have your number”, moi: “No, certainly not, I have a boyfriend!”. So there we have it, I find myself at a loss. I blame the nature of salsa dancing; intimate, undoubtedly sexy, reckless. But whereas I come to life through salsa, I am repulsed by any man who missreads my happiness for anything other than my romance with dance. I am as repulsed as Victoria Beckham would be if her PA gave her a Primark stiletto; get it off me!
Come saturday night, after I don my kitten-heel ballroom shoes, dress my hair in red-rose hairpins and skip off into the sunset towards Kennington tube I pray that this time I will meet a great dancer who has a fabulous, salsa-phobic girlfriend waiting for him back home. Sprawled across silk bed-sheets in agent provocateur lingerie, preferably.
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