Salsa extravaganza - five years on...

I've only tried salsa dancing once in my life, and that was in 1992 in an effort to impress my future wife (which looking back seems ludicrous, as I probably resembled a cartoon character struggling to maintain an upright stance on a floor of recently-spilled marbles). We'd just met and, with our relationship just a few hours old, I was called upon to employ every iota of rhythm that my ill-co-ordinated body possessed in order to portray an image of loose-limbed Latino panache via the medium of dance.

Despite, or as a result of, my undoubtedly crap efforts, we ended up together and as of this evening we've been together for five smashing years. I'm saying this because I don't believe in fate and I think people wrongly attribute it to situations when instead they should revel in the fantastic Technicolor randomness of events the world is really governed by.

I believe instead in happenstance, effort, compatibility and seizing an opportunity when it comes your way, but above all luck. I was unspeakably lucky five years ago and we've since built on that luck to create something fantastic. This, I find infinitely more amazing and satisfying than the notion that there was a mysterious force which engineered our first encounter on the premise that a relationship would thereafter follow.

Happily my dancing shoes are now hung up in the dusty cupboard of memories, though the door remains slightly ajar...