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| The Counting House, Edinburgh |
2021 was taken up with a huge amount of campaigning, trying to make the most of the money available from Sustrans' Spaces for People fund. I posted about this and various issues related to the vexed topic of land access in Scotland on one of my other blogs, Perthshire and Beyond.
During the first year of the pandemic with no vaccinations and great numbers of people becoming very ill and dying, once public transport started to open up again many people were nervous of taking it. Bike sales soared. These factors and the lower volumes of traffic meant there was both need and opportunity to implement temporary bikes lanes and more space for pedestrians and al fresco dining in towns. The government made money available via Sustrans, the cycling charity. I formed a group and over two years campaigned long and hard to try and effect these changes in Perth. But the political will in this Conservative administration was not there. The council passed an application (which it made to itself - ask yourself about the democratic process of that) for a huge new road. Even Perth's one promised bike lane, one mile long, which doesn't really go from anywhere useful to anywhere useful and is forecast to take years to build, has recently come under threat. So I gave up campaigning and contented myself with watching the strides made in other cities, particularly London. It's always easier to vote with your feet than to press for change, but moving house, especially once you have children settled and happy in school, is no easy undertaking.
Last Sunday and last Tuesday in Edinburgh I went to my first milonga at The Counting House, home of of this milonga for about the last twenty years. Apart from the unfortunate addition of the Six Nations flags on the wall, nothing much had changed. Toby was still running things and on the door. The 'entrada' is still an astonishing £3. George, who used to run things and had been nearly as permanent a fixture as Toby in the milongas has apparently moved abroad. Claudia, who used to play some good tandas, hasn't been seen for ages. But Jessie was back, sometimes DJing apparently these days and Gustavo was still around. I am still not used to the slightly glitzier revamp of a few years but am not averse to it. It takes most guys at least 7-10 years to become good dancers and by no means all of them do. But I realised I have been on the scene a long time when I saw a guy who started dancing after me, 'already' (probably 7 years on) looking like he dances well.
The music was, as expected deafening on Sunday from the DJ who reportedly has hearing problems. My sympathy for any such affliction wears extremely thin when the hearing of others is or is threatened with similar permanent damage as a result. Upon various requests, the volume improved though on Tuesday.
I had not planned to dance but to take along a friend for chat and drinks and to see how things were at the milonga. But there were enough good classic tandas to be able to dance quite a lot on Tuesday. On that day I had grabbed my shoes at the last minute, still not really planning to dance. But that gorgeous music rises up inside you and propels you to your feet. When the music pulls you towards the floor it is a better indicator that it is danceable and great than anything else. It is what mystifies me that so many British and European DJs play so many dud tracks. Why play music that doesn't have that pull that has been felt by generations of dancers and which is why certain tracks are more popular than others? Don't they feel it?
I guided my beginner friend, a man of 61. "Llevar" (carry) is so much the better word in Spanish for this activity. But, as that verb suggests, it is hard work. Guiding a beginner dancer by dancing with them is the hardest thing in the milonga, guiding a bloke in the woman's role, while nigh-on essential for them to learn good dancing is harder still. Men just don't move like women. The only men who move more smoothly than other men are gay or double role, male dancers. I can only think of one guy who danced so lightly it was like dancing with a woman. This was a guy from the queer tango scene in Paris, which has some of the best dual role dancers. When I wanted to swap back to traditional roles it made sense when I later discovered he only ever danced in the (traditional) woman's role.
While dual role and male tango dancers from the queer tango scene dance better than most men, nearly all men are much heavier, more awkward and, on the whole, much less willing to "entregarse" (let go, give themselves to the partner and the dance) while not pushing their partner over. As a woman, guiding a beginner man, especially an older man is by far the hardest thing I do in dance. I have done it countless time, but no more! My right side, from my back to my knee were all destroyed by the end of the evening. They were worse the following day by which time my right wrist had joined the cacophony of physical complaint. It was a challenging evening, but fun nonetheless and it was just lovely to hear the music, watch the dancing and be part of that social atmosphere.
A friend talked later about "solo milongas" by which I understood he and his partner dance only together, with no one else in the same room, for perfectly understandable reasons to do with the pandemic. But this for me is a contradiction in terms of what a milonga is, a necessarily social experience. Dancing with only a partner, alone, in a room or a hall, however pleasant, is well, just that. It's no milonga I can imagine nor have otherwise ever heard described.
But is it safe to dance in a real milonga? That depends on personal circumstances and your perception of what safe is and for whom. Vaccinations reduce the likelihood of severe illness and death. More controversially, but still, I believe, they reduce the likelihood that you will catch the disease, at least in the short term. But yes the milongas are likely to be spreader events, of covid-19 just as they are of the common cold. Long before covid it was an unwritten rule that you shouldn't go to the milonga with a cold for that very reason.
I didn't go anywhere during the pandemic, no cafes, no restaurants, no pubs, while there were no vaccinations and for a long time afterwards. This was partly because I had had a bad bout of covid in March 2020, possibly picked up in Spain at the end of February. I had health problems after that and the whole experience shook me. Primarily though it was to protect my parents. But when dad started going out more than I was and the boys were back in school, things started to seem rather back to front. In September I started attending a Spanish Higher class ('A'-level) in school. The boys and my husband caught covid in August 2021, but I didn't. Then my youngest caught it again in January 2022 and again I didn't. Over the winter of 2021-22, unless you lived a hermit-like existence, and with children in school, we did not, you were almost inevitably bound to catch covid. So I seem to have some immunity at least at the moment.
The Edinburgh milonga requires for entry that your vaccinations are up to date as well as a lateral flow test done on the day. I discovered recently that when you report your test to the government there is nothing clever built into this process or the test kit. You part with a significant amount of personal data - as one seems to do increasingly these days - but when you report your result there is no technical verification that the test is accurate. There is nothing at all to stop you lying about your result when you report it, making them useless really for attending events. You might as well just ask people on the door whether they have tested negative that day and rely on good faith because that is what you are doing with LF test results.
Furthermore, the tests themselves are known to be fairly inaccurate. A few months ago a GP told me that one of their patients tested negative ten days running using LF tests and then tested positive with a PCR test.
We still only meet my folks outdoors and we all test beforehand. I don't buy the fake news that LF tests are completely useless. My family has tested positive using them on numerous occasions. However, I have also felt as though I was coming down with, or was fighting off, something very covid-like during and outside of the periods when my family tested positive and I tested negative. It is for reasons such as these that we still only meet the folks outside, after testing and when we feel completely well.
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