Plenty of ballroom

Oh to be in Vienna when the waltz is being played. I just wanted to begin with that line, but I don't know where it's going from here.

Hands up who likes Chopin waltzes on the pianoforte? I don't know why I like them so much - a lot of them are seriously flippant (if - again - there can be such a thing) but there are some slow, melancholic ones too which would be impossible to dance to. A woman has just chosen one of them as a piece of music she was brought up with, but her choice was one of the ones which immediately implants a picture in your head of young, dashing cavalry officers throwing beautiful, opulently dressed sweeties around beneath vast, glittering chandeliers, and drinking just the right amount of Champagne between dances to keep them light-headed, dizzy and carefree - but not so much as to make them all troop into a kitchen and fart loudly in front of their young partners.

The French claim him as their own, and the Poles insist he was Polish, or - to put it in historian speak - claim he is Polish.

Unless you are a contestant on 'Strictly', waltzing is a young thing's game, I reckon. The Tango, on the other hand, is a dance best executed by older people who fully understand the inherent eroticism it displays if done properly. Those Argentinians have had a lot of practice - both individually and as a nation - and the best male dancers are often short, fat and about 65 years old. They hardly move at all, but have distilled about 50 years of flirtation down into a couple of super-charged gestures and subtle inflections of footfall - all the while maintaining a facial expression of disinterested intent which they know, from experience, is the best way to win a fair lady.

I went on a ballroom dancing course once. Seriously, I did. The classes were divided into three groups: Absolute Beginners, Intermediately Skilled and Experts. Needless to say, I was in the first group.

The teachers (and founders of the school) were elderly-ish and extremely strange show-people - a husband and wife team. He was so utterly camp, that I swear she was his beard of about 40 years, and he always wore tight-fitting slacks and a short, sequined jacket with puffy sleeves. She was a peroxide blonde.

The beginners would start at the beginning of the evening, and the experts would sit around the edge of the room, boredly waiting for us to get it over with. If - as in my case - anyone arrived without a partner, then an equally bored-looking young girl from the intermediate group would be assigned to dance with you for the half-hour or so it took for the class to run.

The first thing my one did was to replace my hands into the correct position for the man, because I had nervously put one of them on her shoulder for fear of being thought too prematurely intimate. Then we were off.

I think I began with a fox-trot.

There is a strange law of physics which comes into play when a large group of inexpert people attempt to dance their way around an oblong-shaped room, and I never understood how it worked, nor did I ever understand how to overcome it.

If 30 or so people shuffle about to music whilst staring at their feet to see what position they are in, pretty soon they are all jambed into one small corner of a large room - no matter how large that room is. In this situation, the music has to be stopped and the teacher has to shout directions to the individuals on the outside of the huddle, ordering them to disentangle themselves first for fear of a crushing stampede. In extreme cases, police and traffic wardens have to be called in.

After this has happened about seven or eight times, the beginners are ordered off the floor and advised to stick around to see how it is really done after the intermediates have polished their routines and the professionals throw themselves effortlessly about and generally have a cracking good time. Fucking show-offs.

The main reason me and my two friends (one male and one female - partners, in fact), attended this dance-school was that the bar which was attached to it was the cheapest in town, so we would slip out of class as quickly as common decency would allow, then begin concentrate on genuinely having a good time with all the old folk who frequented the school for the same reason as us. There was not one Tango dancer amongst them, let alone an Argentinian. We were at war with Argentina at the time though, so I doubt if they would have been granted membership.

In those days, I had a rich client whose entire Polo team had been destroyed by the argument over the treeless, God-forsaken little island in the South Atlantic, and they never played a match again - the English players were about as good at Polo as I was at ballroom dancing. The upkeep of about a dozen riderless ponies eventually bankrupted him, with a little help from me.

My mother once told me that if I didn't learn to dance (the Fox-trot) I would never get a girlfriend. Well I proved her wrong, didn't I? (sob...)