First Belly Laugh Of The Summer

Clubbing at Eden yesterday with Ida, Rashidah, Addy, Jianyi and Billy. The club is a converted old-style Singaporean terrace house – narrow but long, you can cram lots of them on a street, but they extend back a long way, and many of them have skylights. I’ve always liked them. Anyway, lots of these houses have been converted into clubs and bars on Mohammed Sultan Road, which means that movement through these clubs tends to be extremely linear. From the front of the club to the back. From the back to the front. Not many lateral options.

So we’re all on the dancefloor, which is long and narrow like the rest of the club, and there’s an exceptionally vigorous guy dancing behind Rashid and me. Very closely. Jianyi chivalrously changes places with Rashid. Vigorous Too-Close Guy accepts this philosophically and moves on to me. Billy chivalrously changes places with me. Vigorous Too-Close Guy remains vigorous and too close behind Billy.

Billy’s eyes pop. The rest of us start to giggle.

So Billy decides he’s had enough, takes a “Still vigorous and too close? I’ll give you fucking vigorous and too close, you wanker” course of action, and starts gyrating madly in full camp mode, head thrown back in orgasmic joy, arms raised in limp-wristed exaltation, hips a sinuous maelstrom of bellydanceresque splendour, and the rest of us are cracking up, and in response to all this Vigorous Too-Close Guy is undeterred, whereupon Billy’s eyes pop again and the rest of us start to completely lose it, all sense of rhythm deserting us, all efforts at dancing replaced by spasmodic twitching as we hunched over aching stomachs, laughing, laughing, laughing, and I felt hysterical and helplessly silly and gloriously alive.