Saturday morning. Saturday morning goes. Sunday morning. Sunday morning goes. Monday morning...
... Think I missed that one completely.
Distracting times indeed. I spent the entire bank holiday running around like an idiot preparing for nothing in particular. Now it's Wednesday night and here I am with about six LIDL chocolate bars in my belly and a sense of rising disappointment in my personal dilapidation. Ah, never mind. May as well finish the pack, guilt is guilt after all, no matter how big or small.
I was warned, last week, not to neglect the novel in favour of boys, and have done exactly that. Now I'm at the point of blogging about it, just to avoid facing the damn thing. What's stopping me? I long to sit down, undistracted and undisturbed. Heck, I even thought about pulling a sicky today, just to be alone with my thoughts and some silly words.... but I've never pulled a sicky and would totally fuck that up.
No, instead, I've been enjoying a rare lull in my team's workload, so that suddenly I have lifted my head and noticed I'm working in a radio station again. Last week was pretty much like living in an advert for all the cake, disco hair and inappropriate touching that goes on in the place. It's so funny how a few people can make the difference. A few new faces can break down the barriers for a little while, and a few old faces can suddenly become much more open.
I seem to have had a lot of 'how was the date's this end of the week, which made me realise just how much I was banging on about seeing that little dreamboat of a man on Friday night. Oops. But hey, at least I can say it went well.
Not the novel though. The novel seems destined to remain handwritten and illegible as a testament to my laziness.
In a haze of possibly the WORST PMT emotions to date (if you're a man / fortunate woman, imagine you woke up to discover everythign in the world was absolultely awful and endless and boring and you were very sad and didn't like anything or anyone, for about three whole days in a row), I winched myself into the back of a colleague's car for a wedding last Thursday night and proceeded to hit the dancefloor to the strains of Lionel Richie and Wham! (again, reference the radio station I work for and therein lies the appeal)
This was all well and good. We flung our arms out dramatically, improvised clever mimes, mimicked each others movements in a heartwarming display of cordiality and just generally looked like utter tits together. It was only when the hotter stuff started playing that a creeping selfconsciousness arrived (albeit waaaaaay too late) Suddenly we were stranded. A group of perspiring women, late twenties / early thirties / early forties, frozen for a moment by the strains of Rita Ora and Rihanna. To be fair, I think the others got their groove pretty quickly, but in my pre-menstrual state of trauma I was left to ask the question which must have struck us all at some point:
How the hell do you dance to this?
And then the other question.
This question is pretty new to me.
Am I too old for this?
I searched for someone young and cool to stand near, but instantly was confronted by a colleague side-walking like a crab on hot coals across my line of vision. God, she had moves. That was the stuff of signatures. Near me, the others had adjusted their style to shed the slingbacks and were desperately reaching and posing in the hope that they might resummon Katrina and the Waves. Miserably, I wriggled my frame in best porno style to the beat, feeling obscene, but smiling so that only I knew it.
This was how my one usual dancefloor preoccupation became two.
My usual concern is only that if I am enjoying myself, it's always pretty singular. I can never be stuffed with the whole posing and grinning at friends. I'm here to move. You are too. Great. Just let's not get in each other's way. This is probably why netball was never my forte. Or any sort of games lesson to be fair.
My next thought was this: If everyone loves cheesy music because they love a silly dance.... or if everyone loves a grind to Pitbull because they're flaunting their body to someone... perhaps the large part and purpose of dancing has always been ironic movement?
Please hear me out before you consign me to the scrapheap for pompus drivel. From what Saturday night televsion tells me all winter long, it seems that more formal dances have a grace, a structure, and a rule. This dispalys the form at it's finest, exploits assets, nutures and inspires art and humility of expression..... and is a gentle reminder of our inner civility.
The wedding disco, however, seeks to destroy this. When the first dance is done and the poor groom can finally get on with enjoying married life unharmed, doesn't everybody hit the floor for a bit a of a smootchy (to be fair, last time I did this was with a lesbian) number that very quickly gets rowdy?
There's nothing more fun or liberating than rejecting what feels like form in favour of a good old laugh at oneself, and each other. I would argue the same for those filthy nightclub scenarios - all bump and sweat and tongues. Essentially it's breaking a barrier of physciality that casual conversation woudln't permit, and traditional dance would never allow.
So we all throw the scores through the window until something comes on that we know NOTHING about.
I'm talking about you, Pitbull.
I have no idea how to dance to your music. Do I jump? What looks sexy? Can I lift my arms up? What about feet? And the bum, the BUM, for Pete's sake.
Anyway, the long and short of it is, inhibition kills improvised dance, but even disinhibition takes quite some stoical practise. I don't think I'm in danger of seducing anyone soon with a cleverly timed squat, but at least I can be silly - REALLY silly - to a bit of Wham! And that stuff comes naturally.
Speaking of which, I cannot say I've enjoyed Talk Talk's 'It's My Life' quite so much as when I was doing my hand washing the other night and it came pumping through my headphones.....
INTERVAL. WRITER RANDOMLY AND DARINGLY FALLS ASLEEP ON SOFA. LIDL CHOCOLATE BISCUIT COMA COMPLETE.
10 MINUTES LATER, WRITER AWAKES PLEASANTLY
... Sorry Talk Talk. But it's my life indeed, and I adored the liberation of dancing to your tune in huge irony, performing my chores, as did the many pairs of knickers I was drowning in Bold.
The entertainment gods have been kind to me, bringing my favourite movie (Hitchcock's Notorious) and my favourite band (the temporarily reformed Grandaddy) to the silver screen and stage here in London, respectively in one week. I feel like I'm reconvening with the very stuff that formed me as a person. Very self-absorbed I know, but by gosh I thought it was something worth mentioning. How exciting to share it all again, as if brand new - a movie and music I thought I had discovered alone one day, now a spectacle, glorious, shared and passionate once again.
Such is the binding power of communal, arranged entertainments. Whether it's dancing, movies, music or just a plain old disco fancy dress day in the office - there is a shared language, a shared culture, a shared warmth. I was attempting to spell the word(s) nun-chucks to impress the boy with such a cult reference the other night (Napoleon Dynamite of course), when I went slinking to my Collins Gem dictionary like the pedant I am.
No such luck with my niche oriental weapon. I did, however discover the words 'nymphomania', 'nubile' and 'nudist' in close proximity.
No idea why those words popped out at me. Only I think I ought to be sharing a little less of that sort of culture and engaging a little more of the unshared if this novel is ever going to get anywhere.
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