For once I didn't knock anyone out

Many of you will have had the (mis)fortune to have been on a night out with me at some point or another. For that I heartily apologise for anything I said or did (or didn’t/couldn’t say or do). One feature of my drunken antics has come up as a focus for discussion on a number of “post night out analyse the evening discussions”. The feature in question is my dancing style which seems to vary between mild-twitch and full-seizure at any moment and for no apparent reason (though if I were a mathematician, which I’m clearly not, I’m sure some formula could be developed between amount of alcohol consumed and style of dancing, where I imagine style would peak at about 4 beers – a point we will call the optimum hip loosity - and then be inversely proportional to each beer drunk afterwards).

Anyway, there is a point to this rambling. I may well be mocked around the world for my unique dancefloor moves and grooves, but I have recently discovered that I can dance. In Cuba. There are a group of Cuban Doctors working at the hospital who invited us to theirs for an evening of Cuban festivities. It quickly became apparent that dancing was going to be involved way before optimum hip loosity could be reached. Before a drink had even touched my lips in fact (Gareth, you would have been in hell). Add to this a cute Cuban Doctor who seemed eager to dance and I was thinking of booking my flight home already. Until I saw them move. I won’t say it was like looking in a mirror (I did mention the cute one didn’t I?), in fact they did have style and grace and rhythm in abundance, but it seems that its dancing without control (they say they’re dancing from the soul or some crap like that). More importantly, standing on people’s feet is not only accepted as an inevitable consequence of the “free-dancing” but actually shows to your partner you’re really getting into the rhythm. The eagle has landed.

This is, of course, only my interpretation of events. Chances are that floating somewhere in cyber space there is one cute Cuban Girl’s blog mentioning stupid English pigs with no rhythm. But I felt better about my dancing, and I think that that’s not bad work for one evening.

I really should tell you about things happening out here, but figure I have two years to filter all that out to you in small, bitesize chunks. And, hey, when you’ve just found out that you may well be a dancing god somewhere in the world, development work in Africa has to take a small step aside I feel.