The Big Read: Dancing out of time

I've been at sea for two weeks now, and that gives a man time to think.

The Crystal Serenity is making her way up the flat, steamy Caribbean from Curacao to Miami, and I've spent much of these past days staring out at a coppered ocean beneath an oyster-shell sky, pondering on mistakes I've made and weaving fine resolutions for the future. One of the things I've decided is to learn to dance.

I don't mean the kind of dancing I've been doing all these years - that goofy knee-trembling, hip-swaying, shoulder-jiggling, half-ironic, anything-goes-but-probably-won't escape hatch of the young and morally lax. Young people make a fetish of dancing as though no one's watching, or really dancing as though you look like you're dancing as though no one's watching, which is another way of saying dancing while self-consciously assuming that everyone's watching, although they probably aren't. No, I mean proper old-fashioned dancing, with a partner and both of you in contact, with steps and synchronising and eye contact and coordination, the way adults do it. The kind of dancing that doesn't care about being watched but is for you and for your partner and for the bright lovely gossamer thing you're spinning between you.

There is something splendid about that old-fashioned dancing. It isn't just ease and control, it's the intrigue of self-expression through restraint, the gorgeous confident glide of civilization. Trying to waltz or box-step or cha-cha with a partner is like writing a screenplay or a sonnet - there's a structure there that only children chafe against, and within it you can tap far deeper wells than by the adolescent flailings of fetterless self-presentation. To partner-dance is to establish a dialogue; it's to recognise and be recognised. You're a dancer the way you're a human being - not merely because you are dancing, but also because you make yourself available to be danced with.

Each night after dinner this past week I've sat in the Palm Court Lounge listening to a five-piece Filipino band with a sassy young singer named April, and watching people place their hands on each other and dance, not always well but always beautifully. I've watched my new friends Paul and Denise from Delaware, who are still learning and go at it with the same impressive, happy, serious-minded enjoyment with which they go at everything, and I've wanted to be more like them. I've watched my new friends Juergen and Brigitte from Dusseldorf, who have been dancing together for 40 years and still stay up later than everyone and make each other laugh all day long, and I've wanted to be more like them too.

In the afternoon yesterday I watched a couple on honeymoon take lessons from an instructor and argue with each other but not unkindly while in the distance behind them the sea-washed mountains of Haiti rolled by like a hazy painted stage set and far off to sea in the other direction a solitary coin-sized rain cloud turned the blue sea silver beneath it.

I've also watched an old woman named Doris who arrives each night after 10pm, always wearing a brightly spangled blouse in a different colour. She walks with some difficulty, slightly hunched and using a cane, but her white hair is perfectly coiffed. She is travelling alone through the world, but, really, who isn't? Each night she takes her seat and waits for a Gentleman Ambassador. The Gentleman Ambassadors are polite and professional fellows who are here to dance with single ladies. There are four of them and I don't know their names, but there's The Bald One, The One with a Moustache, The Old One, and The Short One. The Short One wears a pair of dazzling two-tone dancing shoes, I think in a doomed bid to be known as The One With the Shoes.

When one of the Ambassadors approaches and offers his hand, Doris accepts it and they take to the floor and a change comes over her. Her back straightens, her hips and knees ease, and she moves with a lightness impossible just moments ago. Perhaps it's muscle memory, perhaps the simple pleasure of moving to music, perhaps it releases something trapped in the ageing cage of her body. One night she danced with one of the leads from the on-board troupe, and they finished with a dip that bent her further backward than I can bend forward.

She lives aboard the ship and dances every night. Her eyes are bright. There's something in her that is still laughing and very alive and each night it moves her across the wooden floor and she becomes a young woman again. Doris recently had a birthday: a ribbon is still attached to her door on the seventh deck. She turned 100 years old. I think we should all learn to dance.