‘Love music, can’t dance’ had had for so long been a part of my self-identification that the very notion of this not being an established fact seemed hard to imagine. And yet it was an illusion shattered with a single evening of ceroc.

I discovered, to my great surprise, that when you combine a halfway decent musical ear with some well-taught fixed steps, the result is something which looks not entirely dissimilar to dance …

Ironically, I first got into tango because my then-girlfriend was into it … only once I got hooked, she lost interest. Even when she resumed dancing, we never danced well together as she was simply too impatient to dance with a beginner. So I ended up loving dancing with everyone but her … In retrospect, that should have been a clue that the relationship wasn’t going to end well, but hindsight is a wonderful thing!

Tango was an alien concept. A dance with no steps? Where the follower somehow divined the intent of the leader? People made several valiant attempts to explain, in much the same fashion as Stephen Hawking might attempt to explain the black hole information paradox to a cat.

By the end of the lesson, I was able to do something not anywhere close to a tango walk but she was somehow able to figure out when I wanted to go and when I wanted to stop. This was about 5% signals from me and 95% telepathy, but the 5% part satisfied my curiosity, so that was that.

Except I’d been talked into signing up for a second lesson. This was blatant exploitation of a disability: I am incurably curious about How Stuff Works. So a hint here about tango being a great way to understand the structure of music, a word there about how geeks love tango because there’s so much to understand …

Thing is, if you have someone who loves understanding How Stuff Walks, then the tango walk is the perfect hook. It is, on one level, as simple as it was first presented to me: walking in time to the beat. And, of course, something the world’s most accomplished dancers continue to work on for the rest of their lives. As a topic, it’s weaponised curiosity.

So, my name is Ben and I’m a trainee tanguero. It’s been a week since my last lesson.

Image: Shutterstock