Sinclair on life: Lost opportunities on the dance floor

By PETER SINCLAIR

Who was it that said the two saddest words in the English language are "too late?"

As I wrote in the first of these columns, my personal winter is drawing on. I have the slight, but distinct feeling that if the summer of my life has had an object, then - whatever it was - it has already been achieved.

But a light-hearted look back does reveal a number of things I might easily have done but did not - a bitter-sweet sense of small adventures overlooked.

While there is nothing whose absence is a cause for burning regret, I sometimes wish I had acted on at least one or two of those foolish dreams rather than let them just drift away.

Learn the fox-trot: A frivolous aspiration, you think? Not when I was a boy in the early fifties, and the ability to waltz, tango and fox-trot were the keys to social success.

God knows I tried to learn, but was foiled by my partner in dancing-class, a big girl called Helen. Fourteen years to my 11, she had a naturally high colour and wore her hair in wiry red-brown curls which suggested the coat of some small animal, perhaps an uncommon breed of dog. She was also left-right dyslexic and insisted on leading.

The thunderous advance, the dour retreat, her toss of the head on the turns to throw a grimly coquettish glance back in my direction (all the girls had been taught this trick) - her demeanour throughout was that of someone engaged in a taxing and pointless activity which might eventually do her some good. It was like trying to waltz with a steamroller.

By the time rock 'n' roll came along I had been scared danceless.

Grow a beard: I tried. It was about 1962 during my first TV series, Let's Go!, and I arrived at rehearsal with the promising beginnings of a suitably piratical model - an Errol Flynnish sort of beard.

It showed every sign of developing into something both flourishing and suave until, after a single glance, Kevan Moore (the show's producer) murmured to Joy Robinson, our technical production assistant. She later presented half a dozen disposable razors. Another dream shattered.

Go up the Amazon: Every red-blooded schoolboy's obsession in the forties, but how many of us acted on it? Bill Ralston is the only man I know to have lived the dream, but he assures me that it was not quite as thrilling as the boys' adventure books would have it.

He did buy a pith helmet on Devil's Island and wore it; there were anacondas of threatening length and girth but the Indians treated them as you and I might pet a cat or dog; the dreaded piranha - reputed to be able to strip a man to his skeleton in under a minute - spent their time ogling people's knees from a respectful distance with the wistful expression of schoolgirls eyeing rock singers; and his fellow-adventurers on this voyage of derring-do were almost exclusively geriatric Americans with heart conditions.

Have blue eyes: Enough, I said to myself in a Singapore optometrist's, of the brown, cow-like model with which I was born - but they did not have any blue lenses in my strength.

So I got green instead, which made me look like a Midwich Cuckoo, and I decided that I did not want to look like a Siamese cat as well.

Eat a huhu grub: I know, I know, they have a sweet, nutty flavour not unlike chicken and are quite delicious on a stick with a squeeze of lemon. But if West Coasters are anything like they were when I was a young Greymouth radio announcer in the late fifties, I strongly suspect that the idea of eating them - in fact, the whole Hokitika Wildfoods thing - is a gigantic practical joke being played on the rest of New Zealand.

Do a bungi jump: I have just watched an internet video replay of tennis great Pat Rafter defying every human instinct to launch himself into space. His verdict: "Gracious! Thank goodness that's over!"

Or words to that effect ...

* petersinclair@email.com