“Dance with me,” asks Mrs Bryer, plaintively, and after several hours dodging the issue I realise I’ve got nowhere to go. Except a detour to the wedding reception bar for the half-a-dozen whiskies which will provide the injection of courage I’ll need before I can take to the floor. Sandra loves to dance and I don’t. I’m sure she wishes her old man could dance properly, but in the absence of the requisite skills, if only he could dance without mucking about, or at least might try it sober for once. But, you see, he can’t.
I have to get pretty well blasted before I can even consider getting up and doing the mashed potato, and then, well, then I’ve got some truly great moves to show off because now that we’re up and the booze is racing through our veins, we might as well give it loads, mightn’t we? The irony is that if I were to get up early in the proceedings, with a clear head, and just do that understated shuffle where it looks like I’m stamping out a brush fire and trying on a succession of jackets, I’d draw much less attention to myself.
Once, at a friend’s wedding, his father (who was a bus driver) passed on the advice of a West Indian colleague. Which was as simple as it gets. Relax. That’s all. Once you can relax your body it all comes naturally. And I got it, I really did. For about 2 months I could really move, I was in the groove, watch me now, I said. But one day, this new-found gift just went away as swiftly as it had arrived, the muse was gone, Terpsichore fled my form as if I was not worthy. I recall Saturday Night Fever was at the pictures and I hated the music and the film (although to this day I’ve never actually seen it) so maybe that had something to do with it. So relaxation was a sensation I never felt again when beneath the mirrored ball and caught in the glare of the disco lights, it was more like stiff-backed, leaden-footed, every-man-must-do-his-duty stuff, complete with fixed grin and icy stare.
Sandra likes a bit of the remake of Come Dancing which is on television most of the time, she likes it so much that she also watches the daily updates. Which are actually superior to the full-blown, fly-blown affair with Brucie and Blondie, hosted as they are by the barmy and beautiful Claudia Winkelman. During the week, Claudia and guests preview Saturday’s up-coming clod-hop during which they say things like, “Sergei and Tracey from How Big Are My Tits? Will be dancing to this…” Then they play a snatch of Superstition or Good Golly Miss Molly, you know, the proper versions by Stevie Wonder and Little Richard, and they say how great it’s going to be. “What a great track that is,” says Nasty Craig as he does his quite frankly embarrassing and over-egged sofa-bound-frug, when we all know that, come Saturday, these great songs (and the crap ones) will be performed by the house band – I can’t remember their name, or if they’ve even got one, but this is what I call them: an awful, a truly awful, weedy, clunky, Not-At-My-Wedding, bunch of the duffest of the tune-shy duff.
Back in the last century I nearly got punched when my Mick Jagger impersonation (for which I can only spend the rest of my life apologising) upset some bloke and, as you can never be too sure when these situations might arise I’m going to avoid dance hall misery by getting my friend Mike the copper to show me the Bermondsey two-step, which is not so much a dance move as a martial art unique to South East London.
However, disco horror is but an insignificant pimple on a gnat's arse when compared to the looming, leering, nightmare they call karaoke.
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