Bring On The Dancing Girls

Regular readers will know that I love music. Some readers may even now that I in the past I have attempted to actually move my body in time to music, usually surrounded by people laughing at my uncoordinated efforts to keep time.

At the weekend I will find myself at a party where at some point in the evening I shall be asked to dance to a song I despise by the love of my life, Mrs PM.

Refusal is not an option so I will have to humiliate myself to the sound of whatever tripe the DJ decides to torment me with.

I hate dancing – that is the truth.

It wasn’t always like this.

When I was young and stupid, I thought I was the world’s greatest dancer.  I thought that “He’s the Greatest Dancer” was written about me.

In fact, I was more like a “Discotheque Wreck"!

I was born after the days when a man had to humiliate himself by asking a woman to share the floor with him in, holding her as they swept around the floor dancing a foxtrot or a waltz.

And I say thank God for that!

I was hopeless as an adolescent and young adult when it came to women. I was one of those spotty little twerps whose nervousness was almost a visible entity in its own right.

And I was ugly and thin with mad hair that was enough to scare away any females – even female baboons. My chat up lines consisted of the words:

“EURGGH!! MEURGGGH! Can I ERRR have a snog?”

This usually ended up with a minor bit of female contact – her hand slapping the glasses off my face!

When I was eighteen I found three things that I thought would help me on my quest; night clubs, beer and dancing. Sadly, as safe as they may seem individually, when combined on a Saturday night with an idiot like me, chaos ensued!

My dad always told me about how he would just ask a girl to dance. It involved walking up to a lady and asking her if you could put your arms around her and actually move your feet in a certain way in time to the music!

That terrified me!

The difference was in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s that people didn’t do that anymore. A man just danced on his own until a woman approached and fell for his wonderful techniques. At least that’s what I thought.

Usually I would go to a night club, with my best clothes on, having bluffed my way past the meathead bouncer on the door, and wait on the edge of the dance floor looking at the women dancing around their handbags each of them yearning for the good looking guys (which I wasn’t) and hoping they would be swept away like a princess being rescued by a prince.

I considered myself to be that prince – every single time I went to a club.

Would I woo here with my charms? Would she swoon at my good looks? In my mind’s eye I saw her almost collapsing in sheer delight as I stepped onto the dance floor like John Travolta before showing the entire night club how a man should really dance to “Night Fever”.

The truth is, in order to pluck up the courage to march on the floor, I had to drink a lot of beer. My addled brain then convinced me that I was Danny Zuko in “Greased Lightning" and, as my mates watched in absolute uproar on the sides of the dance floor, I would strut my funky stuff in front of every vaguely good-looking woman in that small well-lit area of humiliation.

It was worse than that. I was utterly convinced that all women were drooling over my body as I danced in front of them. I was so stupid that I even played hard to get by swinging my shoulder and turning away from a woman as she stared in utter disbelief at the acne-ridden drunk chimp wobbling next to her.

On other occasions I found myself almost alone in a pissed stupor, gyrating in a deeply disturbing way with a gurning phizzog that I thought said  “Bring on the dancing girls” but in reality had a similar effect to a skunk spraying the entire dance floor with its rancid stench.

It was only when a female friend at university told me how I really looked that I began to reassess my dancing skills.

“You look like a scarecrow who has just wet himself,” she told me cruelly. “No woman will dance with that! Even me – and I’m your friend!”

It was like a slap in the face.

Thankfully, she kind of taught me how to dance and over the next few years, I improved massively! Sadly, I was still a mess but at least I was vaguely in time and didn’t lurch around ogling all women in the vicinity like a colossal pervert.

I actually started to enjoy the music and voluntarily walked up without being pissed and on a lot of occasions with actual female friends who were willing to enjoy the music with me without fear of me turning into some kind of leering drunken animal.

In fact, I have even found myself dancing and surrounded by six very attractive women. The sad thing was, they were all friends who wouldn’t let me off the dance floor because the song playing was “Man! I Feel Like a Woman" and they found my total embarrassment absolutely hilarious.

Sadly, I have never evolved and the simple basic moves I used way back in my twenties are still the moves I would use now – and probably will use when Mrs PM drags me onto the dance floor on Saturday night.

And people still laugh at me!

"Who's that goon?"

I hasten to add, that all the night clubs I have mentioned above are your normal everyday disco type place that play dance music.

When I have ended up in a rock club, the story is completely different.

Regular readers will have gathered that I am a bit of a metalhead and when a favourite rock song appeared in such a venue (and I am not talking about token rock songs like “Living on a Prayer”, I am talking about air guitar shredders), I leapt onto the dance floor like a man possessed and shredded my air guitar as if I am Kirk Hammett, Ritchie Blackmore, Joe Satriani and John Petrucci all rolled into one.

The difference in this case was that there were few if any women on the dance floor and I was surrounded by similar drunk headbangers and one hundred percent engrossed in the music.

I don’t do that now – in fact I haven’t done it for a while. There have been occasions though – and here they are, including my impression of Slash!

"OH OH OH OH SWEET CHILD O' MINE!!"

Let’s hope they play “Paradise City” by  Guns’n’Roses on Saturday.

That’ll teach Mrs PM to drag me on the dance floor!

Address To The Haggis

I am from England and I speak English, the language of the land where I was born and have lived all of my life. Yet, last Saturday night, I witnessed a tradition that I have never seen before, in a language that I struggled to understand, yet was actually English.

What’s more bizarre are the circumstances. The orator was reciting a poem to a big plate upon which nestled a haggis. The aforementioned Scottish dish had been brought in accompanied by a piper wearing full Scottish regalia and wrestling what looked like a tartan octopus, which made a noise like a cat being strangled.

The man carrying the haggis was accompanied by another rather sinister man holding two very sharp and disturbing knives. The orator spoke these words:

If you didn't understand him, here are the first four verses of what he said:

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, 

Great chieftain o the puddin'-race!

Aboon them a' ye tak your place,

Painch, tripe, or thairm:

Weel are ye worthy o' a grace

As lang's my arm.

The groaning trencher there ye fill,

Your hurdies like a distant hill,

Your pin wad help to mend a mill

In time o need,

While thro your pores the dews distil

Like amber bead.

His knife see rustic Labour dight,

An cut you up wi ready slight,

Trenching your gushing entrails bright,

Like onie ditch;

And then, O what a glorious sight,

Warm-reekin, rich!

Then, horn for horn, they stretch an strive:

Deil tak the hindmost, on they drive,

Till a' their weel-swall'd kytes belyve

Are bent like drums;

The auld Guidman, maist like to rive,

'Bethankit' hums.

Is it easier to understand written down? For me neither.

After the address, we all applauded and the sassenachs amongst us (a sassenach being an Englishman) asked each other what exactly had been said.

This was my first ever Burn’s Supper, a formal dinner celebrating the birthday of Scotland’s finest poet, Robert Burns, a man held in such high esteem by our Scottish brethren that every year, Scots the length and breadth of the country eat traditional Scottish fare (or “fayre”) and recite the great man’s poems in big booming voices.

If you have never heard of Robert Burns you will almost certainly have heard of, arguably, his most famous work, which is sung as the bells chime to bring in the New Year – Auld Lang Syne. He was born on 25th January 1759 and died at the tender age of 37 in 1796. Our Scottish brethren have been celebrating his birthday since the early 19th century.

The poem above is called Address To A Haggis and was written by Burns in 1786 and is traditionally read out during each and every Burns Supper.

Such was the bonhomie that the Scottish organisers of the event allowed lots of sassenachs to attend and appreciate the great man’s poetry. The dinner consisted of traditional Scottish dishes, starting with:

Cock-a-leekie soup

before moving on to:

Traditional haggis neeps and tatties

I can almost hear you asking: What on earth are “neeps” and “tatties”?

“Neeps” are turnips and “tatties” are mashed potatoes.

Dessert was cranachan, a traditional Scottish sweet made of raspberries, whipped cream, honey and oatmeal, all with a dash of whiskey.

It was a great meal and only the second time I had eaten haggis, a dish made up of sheep’s offal, mixed with oatmeal and suet, before being stitched up into a sheep’s stomach and boiled for a couple of hours.

It sounds disgusting but actually, with the neeps and tatties it is very nice.

After dinner, and a couple of humorous speeches, including more lines of poetry from Burns, we were encouraged to dance in a two hour ceilidh during which an instructor showed us a whole bunch of traditional Gaelic dances and we then proceeded to make fools of ourselves attempting to master them.

This involved one of two things:

(1) Mrs PM and I dancing around together, attempting to recall the instructions but ultimately colliding with other similarly inept dancing couples in a melee of laughter and humiliation.

(2) Dancing with just about every woman at the ball, either swinging them around or being swung around, resulting in more collisions in a melee of laughter and humiliation.

“Hi I’m Dave,” I said as I linked arms with each strange woman.

“Hi, I’m WOOOAAAHHHH!!!” she replied as we were both spun around and released before meeting our next partner.

This is how it should be done/

A ceilidh is a great way to meet new people. Even if you are the shyest person in the room, who wouldn't normally say boo to a goose, you can't help but have fun and talk to random strangers as you are hurled around the dance floor.

Personally, we had a bloody great time.

At the end of the evening, we had made new friends, semi-mastered some of the dances and done more exercise in an evening than we probably had in a week.

I would like to thank a long dead Scottish poet for a great evening.

Here's to you, Rabbie Burns! Long may your poems remain, my auld Scottish friend.

I'm just sorry that I don’t understand a bloody word of them.