Song, by Toad is not what one might call the King of Boogie.  Unless exceptionally drunk, when things get a lot worse, I dance pretty badly.  Sort of like a baby giraffe on roller skates, if you need an image to help explain.  Actually, that’s not fair, I don’t think I’m much worse than unimpressively below average for a bloke but the thing is: I just don’t enjoy it very much most of the time.

Honestly, I don’t go out to fling myself around a dingy basement like some spasming epileptic to music I really don’t like very much.  And if they did play music I liked, well, no-one else would dance then.  I go out to have a good time with my mates, and generally that means chatter.  I never used to dance as a kid, but as I’ve got older I have developed a sporadic taste for it, somewhat surprisingly.  Partly this was due to spending more time in clubs, realising what dismally inept dancers most people, girls included although they never think so, really are.  This, along with age and self-confidence, helped to pretty much sort out the self-consciousness, so now, when I’m in the mood (i.e. utterly plastered), I do occasionally feel the urge to boogie the night away.

Now that I actually do dance, however, I am getting a bit bolshier about the times when I really don’t want to. Have been a rather mercilessly cutting youngster, I never really experienced much in the way of peer pressure around drinking, smoking, sex or drugs.  Thus I can honestly say I have never experienced more peer pressure to do anything than I have to dance.  Truly.  People get so nervous if you just don’t feel like it.  Fuck off.  Leave me alone.  Do I look like someone who is just being coy?  Bugger off and flail about like a spastic if you want to, but I am quite happy here with my rather sad-looking gin in a plastic glass, depressingly bereft of either ice cubes or a slice of lime.

So, to the lovely Jamila over at Fucking Dance, I truly apologise, but honestly, sometimes people just don’t feel like it!  And if you are an embarrassed non-dancer now is the time to cast off your shackles of shame, brother, and slouch at the bar with pride.  Give the twitching muppets out there prancing about in broken glass and someone else’s sick the finger.  Do it boldy and with pride.  Dancing can be fun, but basically it’s just bobbing about in the dark to rubbish music in hilariously over-priced venues that you would never consider for a second if you weren’t rip-roaring drunk.

Honestly, are your friends that boring that you have to avoid talking to them for such a length of time?

Billy Bragg – Talking the Wag Club Blues
Blur – On the Way to the Club
David Bowie – Life on Mars?

Mind you, if there’s an easier way to pull I’ve yet to find it