My dance instructor has students as old as 90, so he shouldn’t be fazed by a hunched 46-year-old with no rhythm and keyboard-gnarled claws for hands
I know it’s Strictly season, because I see it when I look into other people’s houses, my chilly face pressed against the glass, illuminated like the Little Match Girl by the glittering scenes of wonder inside. I can’t watch at home, because my cohabitants – men of woefully gender-normative taste – are sequin-intolerant, barely able to make it through the opening credits. My only hope of watching a season would be if Kevin McCloud and Parasite director Bong Joon-ho signed up. And also if, instead of dancing, they shot at each other. I crave spandex, chiffon and the glint of a glitterball on highlighted cheekbone; I get Nazi Megastructures.
But if I can’t watch Strictly, perhaps I can experience it. I have never really danced; I was once sent to a swing dancing club for an assignment, where a misguided chap dismissed my pleas of incompetence and forced me to lindy hop with him. “You look as if you’re carrying a cockroach in your mouth,” my best friend said of the resulting photographs, which I have burned.
