Twelve (12)

The seasons go by very fast.  It doesn't seem like long ago that I could tell people I'd been learning tango for six months or twelve months and they'd smile and nod and look impressed.  At some point I began saying '3 years' or 'four years' or 'five years', and people stopped looking impressed and instead simply started nodding their heads, as if to say 'seems about right'.  I assume this means I'm following the natural curve of tango progress.  At least people don't usually shake their heads in horror, so I suppose I'm not behind or under the curve somewhere.

But the years blur together.  When I started, I remember chatting with someone who'd been dancing tango for three years.  It seemed like an unimaginable investment of time to me back then.  And now, of course, I can see that there's not ever going to be an end to it.  Or I think I can see that.  Maybe in three years' time I'll feel differently.  Three years is a drop in the temporal ocean.  Three years just gets you to the point of realising that you've probably just spent three years working on the wrong things and ignoring all the right things.  And the cycle repeats every year or two or three.

There are twelve months in a year.

Thirteen (13)

What can you do about bad luck?  Not much, I think.  You can do your best to improve your odds of having accident-free dancing, but you can't ever completely account for the behaviour of others.  Who knows who's about to elbow their way into the ronda and tread on everybody's toes?  You can slot yourself in ahead of, or behind, or ideally between the most social dancers present, but sooner or later somebody's going to attack you with a hot cup of coffee on the way back from the kitchen or the bar.  You can have complete control over your movements and have lightning reflexes, but a slippery patch of floor will trip you up regardless.  Hopefully your bad luck doesn't take your partner down with you.

I have a horrible feeling it's contagious, though.

Thirteen is unlucky for some.

Fourteen (14)

The poetry is something I'm missing out on.

I don't understand the words.  Not as they're being sung.  I can look at the lyrics and work them out.

I need to do better at this.  I'm missing out on a lot.

When the songs are sung in my ear as we dance, I can feel the poetry, and the shape of what I'm missing.

I'm missing a lot of information.  There's often a contrast between the words that are sung and the tune that is played.  I'd like to feel that.  I feel it in people I dance with who do understand the lyrics.

There are 14 lines in a sonnet.

Fifteen (15)

There's often a bit of point-scoring, isn't there?  Some places just seem to encourage it.  Some others, even though all the same people attend, are relaxed and unhurried and friendly.  Not that a little friendly competition hurts.  If it weren't for that, who'd bother getting any better?

It's the unfriendly competition that's the problem.  I've seen people actively standing in front of people to block them from the view of someone else. I've seen people hijacked on their way back from the dance floor, before the next tanda has even begun to play.  Those who want to play by the rules tend to suffer.

When you win your first point in tennis, you get 15 points on the scoreboard.

Sixteen (16)

Size sometimes matters.  But this dance of ours holds another set of apparent contradictions.  The largest of people are often the lightest on their feet.  The smallest of people can feel the heaviest.  If you haven't been watching the dancing carefully enough, it can come as a surprise.  It's a beautiful moment when you embrace somebody who looks like they would be blown away by a faint breeze, and they turn out to be anchored to the ground.  And you can feel the floor and the shoes and the feet as though they were yours.

There are 16 ounces in a pound.

Seventeen (17)

A nice exercise in improvisation.  Throw a bit of random into your practice.  Every third or fifth or seventh step, go in a different direction than you would normally.  Break the patterns.  The patterns dig themselves in, you have to fight to break out of them.  I do, at least.  Maybe in thirty years' time, every direction will feel as natural as every other.

According to some surveys, if people are asked to choose a number between 1 and 20, they choose 17 a disproportionate amount of the time.

Eighteen (18)

Freedom from and freedom to.  This is what the mirada and the cabeceo offers us all.

Freedom from the creeps and crazies, and from the lead weights and unmusicals.

Freedom to vote with our eyes.  To see the whole room, and to make a choice of exactly who you want to dance with at exactly this moment.  And they have the freedom to say no, without having to say 'no'.

The voting age in many countries is 18.

Nineteen (19)

There are times when the dance is a battle of wits.

In a good way.

Like a game of chess or of Go, perhaps.

She refuses to take me up exactly on my suggestion, but slows it down or speeds it up or sometimes sabotages it completely.  When it works with the music and doesn't crash me into anyone else on the dance floor, I couldn't be happier.

She might challenge those patterns that I've fallen into.

A wake-up call.

Go is played on a nineteen-by-nineteen board.

Twenty (20)

Contact lenses.  Spectacles.  The solutions to short-sightedness at the milonga.  Those that wear glasses have their appealing little rituals.  The invitation to dance is accepted, the glasses are folded and secreted somewhere on the person or on the table.  Occasionally I'm asked to carry them in my pocket.  Occasionally they're pushed up to the top of the head.  Some people keep wearing them while dancing, which can pose interesting logistical challenges with respect to head position.  The dance ends.  The glasses-wearer is escorted back to the table on which they can find their glasses.  The ritual concludes.

20/20 vision indicates normal human visual acuity.

Twenty-one (21)

I don't know the difference between sprituality, religion, psychic powers, paranormal occurrences.  Well, I do. But to me they all make the same sense.  In the end, I can't see that we're more than just the sum of electrical impulses flashing through the brain.

But when those moments happen.  Those moments.  You know the ones.  When they happen, and the only thing that's in your head is the music and the movement and the conversation with your partner, I think that must be what people mean when they talk about the soul.  For those moments, perhaps we really are more than the sum of our parts.  More than the sum of our partnership.

The soul was measured as weighing 21 grams by Dr Duncan McDougall in 1907.

Twenty-two (22)

You want to dance, but the quicker you choose to dance with someone the less likely you'll make an informed decision about whether their music will mesh with your music.  And with the music.

You want to sit, but to sit means to reject invitations from the people you want to dance with.  To sit briefly risks sitting perpetually.

You want to impress the person you're dancing with.  But the stronger that desire, the less free and natural is your dance.  Limbs stiffen up and movements start to jerk or stutter, or your lead becomes a murmer or a mutter.

Some days, you just can't win.

One definition of Catch-22:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.

Twenty-three (23)

A birthday vals.  Secretly quite liked, though protested against, by the birthday celebrant.  Always a sweet moment.  Sometimes slightly resented, especially if the chosen vals is one that we all want to dance to.  And the star of the show, the birthday boy or birthday girl.  Not necessarily always the one to be the centre of attention.  But this is their moment on their day.  A whirlwind of partners who have maybe fifteen seconds each in which to fulfil their purpose.  Their purpose: to make the star shine, look good, feel good.

When you have 23 people in a room, there's a 50% chance that two of them will share the same birthday.

Twenty-four (24)

A day without tango?

Not really possible.

No milonga, maybe.

But there's music to listen to in the car, on headphones in the lunch break, on the radio in the evening.

There's a walk to practice whenever we walk.  I feel that, as a leader, I have a lucky break in this.  I can practice my walk slightly more discreetly than a follower.  Who would tend to practice walking backwards.  In high heels.

There's a blog or an article or something else to read.  Someone's thoughts that I'll have never thought about before.  There's therefore something to think about, too.

Arrangements to make, photos to look at, people to coordinate with, muscles to stretch or knead or exercise.

The problem with having a day without dancing, is that it's all too easy to fill it up with too much tango.

There are 24 hours in a day, give or take.

Twenty-five (25)

Tango outside the big cities is often sparse.  The dedicated few travel between them, like oases in the desert.  But our desert consists of motorways and highways and freeways and country roads and coastal roads.

The oases are so refreshing, though, that we make the journeys willingly.  Then we worry about our carbon footprints.

The M25 links much of the tango in the South-East of England.  And if it doesn't, it links to a motorway that does.

Twenty-six (26)

I'm now sensitive to twinges, pains and glitches in my body in a way that I never was before tango.  The neck, shoulder, back, leg.  Any pain might be the beginning of the end of something that's such a huge part of my life.

And more than any of the above, it's the foot that worries me.  It's a miracle of evolutionary engineering.  The sheer miles I've walked on mine are staggering.  And luckily, so far, staggering I'm not.

But it worries me.  When your sanity depends on good health, hypochondria can become paralysing.

There are twenty-six bones in the human foot.

Pausa

I think we've reached the end of a phrase.

This seems a good time to hold position for a beat or two.

But we'll move again soon.

Count on it.

Zero

Of course, for every one of the good days you have another day when you feel like a zero.  Invisible and insignificant.  Those are the days you couldn't sleep, you found the cat had been sick in your shoes, and the trains were delayed.  You got to the milonga late, stressed and with only your second-favourite pair of shoes to comfort you.

On those days, you can feel the don't-dance-with-me emanating from you in waves.  And, because life's like that, people don't dance with you.  You don't get asked.  Your invitations are refused.  The tandas you do manage to dance by hook, by crook, or by calling in favours are grudging and a drudge.  You get trodden on and kicked.  You feel elegant as a baby giraffe.

Don't remember those days.

Well, remember enough to learn from them what you can.

Don't leave shoes and cats together.
Don't drink too much coffee before going to bed.
Take an earlier train.

But the things you can't learn from, let them go.  Remember the good days, or minutes, or seconds.

Yesterday

Or maybe the day before.

I can remember the feel of the movement.  Sometimes, often, I can't remember the music exactly.  But I remember the feel of the music.  Smooth or jagged or elegant or frantic or a little bit of each.  I have sudden, very vivid flashbacks to individual moments, seconds, milliseconds.  Maybe it was a moment of particular togetherness, or a moment of particularly joyful surprise.  Or a little bit of each.

Some of these echoes last a long time.

X-Factor

Some people have this thing.  They just magnetise themselves.  The world organises itself to revolve around them for a little while.  It's fascinating to watch, and it's interesting to try to resist it.  We don't quite queue for dances, but around these people we do the closest thing to it.  We wait until the tanda ends and look hopefully at them.  From the opposite side of the room, from a vantage point in the doorway, from a couple of chairs down.  They choose someone to dance with, and then the room shuffles around as the rest of us become aware of each others' existence again.

Some of them don't even notice they have it.

But here's the good part.

Everyone has days when they're the one with it.  You wake up in a good mood, you have a lazy day and relax or else get a lot done and feel on top of the world.  You get to the milonga and everything goes right.  From the first moment to the last bars of La Cumparsita.  Those are the days when the X-Factor came to visit.

And you probably didn't even notice you had it.

Wellness

I think tango improves my health.  It's not a workout, as such.  I don't think it matches up to the gym.

But it's a meditation.  You put yourself somewhere else.  Your attention is focused on a single thing.  There's no spare brainpower to think of anything else.  Not for me, at least.  For a little while, you can't afford to have work worries pop into your brain or money problems barge themselves into your consciousness.  It's meditation for those who think meditation sounds too much like hard work.

Somehow, the burdens seem less heavy and the barriers seem less significant at the end of a milonga than they did at the beginning.