it takes two to tango

A night out at the Royal Oak, birthday dinner with a friend and his friends, a delicious ocean trout steak, medium rare, but with crispy skin, on a bed of honey glazed stone fruit, and a pineapple chutney and baby or at least quite youthful rocket leaves. I knew few of the people at table but they were very approachable and I conversed readily, a relief after a number of dud evenings of late, in which I just couldn’t get myself into gear socially, especially the new year thing at Catherine’s, but then I’ve become very wary of her friends.

Highlight of the evening came upon leaving the Oak, packed with persons mainly of my generation, dancing merrily and mouthing along to the words of Lucifer’s Lounge schmaltz covers, Do you know the way to San Jose, Perhaps perhaps perhaps, Delilah and such. A bit too smiley for me perhaps perhaps perhaps. Visited the Banque and it happened to be tango night. About half a dozen couples, all ages but mostly forty plus, had commandeered the front section of the bar to strut their stuff. Playing fuzzily on the back wall was a French tango flick, the tangoistes all with glossy dark hair drawn taut to the nape, their stick-pins stumping with swift precision forwards and backwards and sideways, their upper torsos stiff and stately as carriages, swinging from side to side in perfect unison, and from time to time, the pins halted, the male would bend back the female and loom over her. These formal dances are a self-disciplined form of sex, surely a formalisation of the stalking and courting rituals of certain mammals and birds, with predator-prey undercurrents, an extension and teasing out of ecstatic foreplay, and played down at times even to the near-opposite pole of applied mathematics, yet ever-present is the beauty of human grace. Watching all this – and the half-dozen partner-exchanging couples in the room were almost on a par with the pros on the screen – gave me a surge of pride and delight in being human, in our endless ways of transforming the primitively urgent into something delicate and artful, and somehow profoundly respectful, a recognition of how seriously important it is not to tread on each others’ toes.