Nothing would seem more natural than for the Americans cage fight spectators so cruelly captured in all their snarling, pitbull splendour by Sacha Baron Cohen in Bruno to finish their evening out with a spot of line dancing.
But then I am clearly heaping unfairness on injustice. I may well be the only person in the world on whom the charm of line dancing is simply lost.
Even so, I was slightly taken aback on wandering into the Oxfam shop in Ealing, west London to find, nestling between a work on Soweto and another presenting Michael Light's 128 images of the Moon, an entire book devoted to this strange source of human pleasure.
At £1.99, my duty to research, and to the charitable interests of Oxfam, probably required me to dig a couple of pound coins out of my pocket there and then. My excuse is as lame as the dance: I was in the shop because my younger daughter had decided on the spur of the moment to buy me a book of my choice (I plumped for Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything in an attempt to compensate for all those hours wasted in science lessons), and ducked out of making any purchases of my own.
So I remain in ignorance of all there is to say on the subject.
Regulars at Salut! may know that I am not very fond of dancing at all. I get up, nobly overcoming natural resistance, and make the odd attempt at jiving or what my daughters have been heard to call "dad dancing". But I cannot pretend to enjoy it. It helps a lot if I like the music that is playing, but my tastes in pop are narrow and tend to be poorly catered for by many DJs.
My first encounter with line dancing was getting on for 20 years ago at a Butlin's holiday camp in southern England where, for some reason, a folk festival was being held. Yes, I know that removes all legitimacy from my complaint, but I felt a pressing need to explain why I was there.
It was certainly not my intention to take in the Wild West festival that was being run simultaneously on the same site. Car workers from the Midlands, I was told, were prominent among the festival goers and all were decked out in their best cowboy (and cowgirl) gear.
None of the restaurants was hugely appealing, but the steak bar seemed harmless. Inside, the dining area was separated from a dance floor by a low panelled partition. I could therefore see all these Brummies, resplendent in their stetsons and studded leather outfits, arranged in lines and doing that silly little quarter-turn jump at the end of each sequence of steps.
And because I couldn't see their feet, the jump, preceded by some modest to-ing and fro-ing, was the only movement visible. It took considerable restraint to avoid laughing out loud (though I am not sure the British Leyland conveyor belt team would have suppressed their own chortles at the choruses of The Spanish Lady or Whiskey in the Jar).
In one bar on the seafront in Le Lavandou, the foot action is there for all to see. Here, and for all I know elsewhere, the dance is called Le Madison. And the sighs that greet each announcement by the sailor-suited DJ that he's about to play the Gigolo or Singing in the Rain, both considered suited to the dance, bear witness to its popularity. In fact, one English resident of France wrote recently that it was not until she joined Madison sessions in her village that she was able to make friends.
At another of the promenade bars, it is possible to switch off mentally from the entertainment and instead follow the televised sports - and believe me, this is true - of lorry-pulling and racing with heavy sacks of ice on the back.
With sailor boy, there is no such distraction, no such escape. But hang on a minute. I've just thought of a welcome side effect.
While I rise with as much enthusiasm as can be mustered for le rock 'n' roll, I have been allowed to maintain unchallenged the strongly asserted position that never in the time that remains to me on earth shall I be found taking part in line dancing, whatever name it goes by.
And since our singing mariner chooses tracks galore for aficionados of Le Madison, that leaves me plenty of opportunity to sit out the dancing without further explanation.
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