Rain; goodbye
18th December
I get caught in the rain again, for what feels like the millionth time since September; it rains for hours, and I get soaked to the skin walking; it’s still raining now. I have a stupid, horrible block about buying a new raincoat and need some kind of spell to get a new one. But God bless the udon bar I turn up to, and the kind people who work there and invariably give me free things on the house: today, iced lemon honey tea, and perfect offal-coloured pickles.
I’m going home tomorrow: a midday, £15 miracle train to take me North, where the city will not be unfriendly, and where I can take refuge in my mum’s old raincoat. I think this will be my last post for the year; I might dance a little in the days before the new year, but I’m not sure yet. I’ve got another piercing - my third in three months - this time in an unbelievably stupid place, my right forward helix, so prime territory for getting bumped during dancing. We’ll see if it lasts. I go on Friday and on Saturday, where attendance is abysmal, so bad it almost seems a joke – and over the weekend I experience that kind of shimmering where you feel you might be on the verge of becoming ill, except I duck it and don’t.
Sunday night, however, is recuperative. I try, again, the milonga round the corner, higher-level and less familiar to (and with) me, and the best time there year. My friends A and P are there, and I dance with them both, who are so joyful; there’s a great dancer up from Bristol, who’s fun and brilliant, and suddenly an Italian sits down next to me and adopts me, regaling me with eg. exactly what he thinks of women with dyed blonde hair, but also about his favourite Byron poems or the tiny crystalline verses of Ungaretti, and he likes dancing with me enough that we do three tandas. I can’t tell whether he’s trying to chat me up or just being Italian, and I don’t care. He likes my high thrown boleos, and is delighted when I tell him it’s because I practice. He makes me promise I’ll come to his favourite Tuesday night milonga in the new year. Well, maybe I will.
I’ve written so much. Well over twenty poems in the last three months, two essays, a book proposal; this year too I finished, at last, an essay I’ve been trying to write since 2019. 21,000 words of this blog. More to follow.