On Friday There’s still life in the old dancing feet
IHAVE been invited to a “disco”. How thrilling! Imagine that – at my age, as well. Who’d have thought there might still be life in these old dancing feet?
The invitation is to a local running club’s awards night, which will include a buffet as well, and it sounds like a lot of fun: but I don’t much like mass-participation buffets, because the meat-eaters always leap up first and pick the plates clean of all the nice veggie stuff.
They will hog the vegetarian spring rolls and the spicy samosas, and will leave behind with great disdain all the clammy, greasy meat-on-sticks things.
They will then stagger across to you, smiling over the top of their heavily-laden plant-based plates, and quiz you about how long you’ve been a vegetarian, why you decided to be one and whether it’s a hard thing to do.
“It is”, you reply, “if numpties like you fleece the buffet table of all the good stuff before we get there”. Don’t get me started on that one: but I do love a disco. I last went to one at Christmas, when there was dancing after a festive meal, and everyone got very enthusiastic when the DJ started playing a lot of Seventies disco favourites. In fact, one member of our party is only now returning to full fitness after a long and enthusiastic evening dancing in high heels while hydrating with copious quantities of sparkling white wine. She woke up the following morning in agony, with her right ankle the size and colour of a party balloon, and has only now resumed light training.
For chaps like us, though, there’s only one golden rule when it comes to a disco, and that is You Must Dance. There’s nothing worse than being that one who sits resolutely in his seat, sipping on a graduallywarming pint, saying he doesn’t like the music and isn’t going to dance.
That one will have a very dull evening and will be marked out by his friends and peers as a chap who doesn’t join in.
You must swallow your pride, ignore those snobbish instincts that tell you you simply can’t dance to this rubbish, and seize the moment.
You will feel that everyone is watching you, but in reality nobody is. You can shuffle away in front of the flashing traffic lights to your heart’s content. You will even begin to enjoy yourself: but there is a thing that chaps of our age must never, ever do, and that is to succumb to
Everyone got very enthusiastic when the DJ started playing a lot of disco favourites
the temptation to dance to a song called Oops Upside Your Head by the Gap Band.
Originally released in 1979, this song has a set dance which involves sitting on the floor in a long line, moving from side to side in time with the beat, then forwards and backwards. It looks for all the world like a training row for the Top Of The Pops coxless eight.
Gentlemen, if you indulge in this mullarkey your knees will seize, and your lower back will go into a kind of spasm. From the grin on your face the world thinks you’re saying: “Wow; I’m having so much fun!” when in fact it’s merely a rictus of pain.
This sort of thing was all very well when we were 19 or 20, carefree and nimble, spending our Saturday nights drinking weak and fizzy lager at the Tropicana in Station Square. Now, this particular song is nothing more than a one-way ticket to the medicine cupboard and that ointment that smells like sports changing rooms.
Dance, if you must, but at the first sound of the Gap Band, I urge you to make your excuses and leave.