Dancer

No-one at any rally who spent a night in the bar, when there was music, could fail to have seen him dancing, as I had done several times over several years, presuming him to be Belgian or Dutch.

Something over six foot four, not conventionally good-looking but mobile, warm, interesting features – and no more than mid forties. It was his enthusiasm, his energy and his slimness – his slim hips dancing with smooth fluidity in tight blue denim (probably matching blue eyes but I may have imagined those) - that was memorable, that absorbed my non-dancing attention (spouse does not dance and I was still too sober). But of far greater impact was the shock of his pure white, longer than shoulder-length hair - he was too young for this, too mobile, too fluid ... too sexy ... and the contrast was invariably mesmerising.

At breakfast on Sunday, spouse and I having briefly bickered, I stalked late into breakfast and had to take the only chair between spouse and this man who’d fired my thoughts the night before. His still-damp hair was rat-tailed and not so white and his companion had only a few minutes earlier been described to me as “son of Quentin Crisp” (he’d been in the bunkhouse and we’d been trying to work out who’d shouted out in the night, as if having sex), and he complained - an Englishman that as a result of all last night’s dancing he was suffering from “that disease that alsatians get” by which he meant dislocated hips.