Last year, before we got married, we took dancing lessons, in preparation for our first dance as a married couple.
I’d learned ballroom dancing as a teenager while at secondary school for two hours per week in my 6th and 7th form years. I can still remember the foxtrot and the waltz. Even the awfully named Gay Gordons. But I don’t think it got any more complicated than that.
My wife hadn’t learned ballroom dancing at her school, but she is far more graceful at it than I am. She has a natural affinity to dancing which I do not share. I, on the other hand, couldn’t help but look down at her feet to make sure I was doing the same thing as she.
Our teacher wasn’t the best teacher I’ve ever had and that may have had something to do with our increasing lack of enthusiasm for the dancing classes and our increasing excuses as to why we could never make it to the lessons. But make it we did and by the end of it I felt that I was doing a very good impersonation of someone who looked like they knew what they were doing.
So it was with great delight that I came across this - memories came flooding back, including of the fellow with the kilt that the article refers to.
We shall dance again, I am sure and, without the added stress of planning a wedding, I am also sure it will be a much more pleasurable experience than it was.
As for our wedding dance, I had so relied on watching my wife’s feet that by the time it came for the dance and I couldn’t see her feet under her flowing wedding dress, I just made it up as I went along. But nobody knew that and we looked like we knew what we were doing. And we had fun.
