About six weeks ago I attended a cocktail party. The first for a long time, actually: I haven’t been moving in circles where people organize cocktail parties.

Adult conversation, dressing up, live music, dancing, and all that… very nice. And the best part was the dancing. I have really missed dancing. I used to dance quite a lot during my university years, performance dance as well as social dancing – Swedish jitterbug (bugg), quickstep (which is generally called foxtrot in Sweden), tango, lindyhop. But I never got around to finding a dance club after moving to London so I lost my dancing habit. Now this cocktail party gave me the push I needed, and I decided to finally take up dancing again.

Most social dancing in Sweden is quickstep and bugg – if you know those two, you’ll get by in almost all situations, unless you specifically go to a tango or gammeldans event or a salsa venue, which I don’t plan to do. In quickstep most guys, even the really good dancers, stick to the basic moves, and I can follow those without much work. But I haven’t danced bugg for almost 10 years now, before I can go out and dance, I felt I needed to refresh my memory. So yesterday I started on a seven-week bugg course. Once that’s done, I’m going out dancing!