This city can make me feel like a tango god. When I get the right milonga, the right atmosphere, the right music, the right follower, the right floorcraft … when everything flows effortlessly, my partner and I reading each other perfectly, and I feel like I own the floor.

It can also make me feel like a tango toddler. When I’m at a milonga where the music is relentlessly fast, where everyone is spinning in high-speed circles, and I wonder what the hell I would do even if someone was looking in my direction …

I have a dozen identical white linen shirts, which you might think sounds like a lot. But given that I generally need a change of shirt during a milonga, and am sometimes doing two milongas a day, dropping and collecting laundry is a regular task.

The hours of my local laundry are clearly shown as 11am to 9pm. Of course, this being Argentina, that doesn’t mean 11am to 9pm. It means ‘We do, broadly speaking, have the general ambition of operating hours which may perhaps bear some resemblance to these. Oh, and we may randomly close for half an hour to an hour at any point.’ Which explains this sign when I got there at 5pm …