Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

"Waiting".
Regret provenance lost.

Being tall, I was consigned to and imprinted with the man's role at dancing lessons in an all-girls school and so became a lousy ballroom dancer; I try to push blokes round the floor and it's a habit that goes down badly. I hated the whole dance-hall ethos anyway, sitting along the wall at school hops waiting to be picked by the local high school boys shipped in for the purpose; I resented being almost relieved when some scruffy midget did so. Mind you, I did get asked to do the last waltz by Spud Murphy (honest), he was considered top catch as he was six foot and didn't have acne.

I can jive well - oh, and Old Time Dancing, veletas and St Bernard waltzes were taught by Gran and became much loved. As kids do, my sister & I would get dressed up in tarnished silver shoes and petticoats and waft along the landing to Harry Davidson's dance orchestra on the wireless.

If you asked me actually to learn the Tango I'd say 'fat chance', but in contrast to my boredom with the rest of ballroom, I've become fascinated by that dance. It started with the remarkable sequence when Pacino as the irascible blind ex-soldier took the floor with a shy girl in "Scent of a Woman". A more cleverly-judged piece of business I have never seen.

Behind the dance is a whole social history, its inception in the brothels of Argentina, its spread through Europe, repression by the Junta at home, its re-invention and re-emergence. It grows from a rich musical genre. I've read quite a lot about it and watched innumerable videos of every variety of tango and dancer - older ladies with fat bums, long-haired adolescents in dirty tee shirts, double-breasted gigolo types and elegant mamas. No matter whom, they all manage to give off that wonderful feeling of passion held in a formal cage of movement; it's a sexual dance, but it can be an impersonal sexuality, a dance about the sexes.

For beauty, my favourite Tango dancers of all are Jesus Velazquez and Natacha Poberaj who make it a thing of elegance and line, he makes you look at him in spite of her. Further down the pecking order, I'm rather fond of Fred Chu's hat and suit

I wrote the words below back in 1995 and I can find no nicer ones to describe our history. Her son rang to say that Mabe died suddenly in hospital on Saturday aged 96.

'Thirty five years ago a client brought me flowers to thank me for some bookish favour and she has flowered in my life ever since. Mabe was fifty-five then and I was in my late twenties; she was a handsome, articulate woman, amusing, a bit fiery, a voracious reader. In the years since, I have seen her through the death of her husband, she helped me pack up and divide a home ("Oh, look, this is chipped, let's put it in that box"). We have sorted out the vagaries of children, survived serious illness, walked many miles through London parks, burned up the telephone. Recently she asked me to dig out some photos I had taken, for her grandson who is asking for memories. It was only as I scanned and printed them that I truly took on board that Mabe is now very old - in her nineties, stooped and changed. As I begin to creak, she begins to fail. That thirty year gap that once was negligible is now significant...'

I'm in that state of exhausted euphoria that comes after a day of hard labour in burning sun. The euphoria is purely physical, otherwise I am unsettled, trying to adjust to the loss of a bank of trees straight in front of the house. It looks like a WW1 battlefield out there with its 20 jagged stumps, heaps of sawdust and as many branches still to move as we have moved already.

Three of us went flat-out to drag piles of branches away from the chain-saws, strap them to our neighbour's Kubota RTV tractor & haul them down to the bonfire site. We were soaked with sweat, scratched, bitten and covered in pine resin. We got through four quarts of mineral water and four cartons of juice.

Emma worked like a Trojan - her brother, our usual helper, is off threshing on the harvest, but she's a frail-looking toughie with the strength of a boy. "I caaaan't do any more," I said, collapsing into the sawdust. "Well go inside and leave it to me," she said. Of course, I didn't, you find strength when you need it.

As the sun went down, I sat outside the kitchen door and watched it colour the sky for the first time in twenty years. That's nice, but it is going to take time and a hell of a lot of effort to repair the ugliness of the felling and to landscape in new trees. As we were saying, eating our sandwiches with the boys, we need to plant something quick-growing for us and something beautiful for the long-term. Sad, isn't it, when you realise that you need to think of it like that?

The greatest of Earth's living forms,
Tall conquerors that laugh at storms;
Their challenge still unanswered rings,
Through fifty centuries of kings.

The nations that with them were young,
Rich empires, with their forts far-flung,
Lie buried now-their splendor gone:
But these proud monarchs still live on.

So shall they live, when ends our days,
When our crude citadels decay;
For brief the years allotted man,
But infinite perennials' span.

Joseph B. Strauss