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DANCE PARTNERS

NEWS that Strictly Come Dancing will, after all, be on television in October, gave me a lift. Strictly is exactly the type of comfort TV I crave at the moment: camp, kindly, familiar, celebratory, unashamedly emotionally manipulative, and all dressed up in va-va voom fake tan, sequins and sparkle.

Most years, I end up being only an occasional viewer as our autumn weekends tend to be jam-packed.

Not this year, though. Finally, in September, our wall calendar has caught up with our 2020 reality: almost every weekend is showing as echoing white space. So, thank goodness for Strictly, I shall go to the ball, but from my sofa.

The big news of this year’s show is that Olympic boxer Nicola Adams will dance with a woman. And about time, too!

There are interesting literary precedents for same-sex dance partnerships. Sebastian Barry’s award-winning Days Without End begins in the American West in 1851. Orphaned teens Thomas McNulty and John Cole answer a saloon advert for ‘clean boys’ and are employed as female-impersonating dance partners for lonely miners.

In Anna Hope’s Wake, set in the aftermath of World War I, Hettie works as a dance instructress at the newly-opened Hammersmith Palais. She sits in a caged pen alongside her fellow professional dancers, until hired for sixpence a dance.

Dance pulses through Zadie Smith’s most recent novel, Swing Time. Its story moves between London, West Africa and New York, but is haunted by the rivalrous friendship struck between two biracial seven-yearolds in Miss Isobel’s dance class in early Eighties Kilburn.

All cultures have dance, formal and informal, ritualistic and hedonistic. The last proper night of our holidays was marked by an impromptu garden disco, which saw kids jumping around together with the gamest of the parents.

It was an enticing echo of carefree summers — and reminded us that good times will roll again.