Michael Gove: dad dancer extraordinaire

The scene is not edifying. A 54-year-old man dances by himself, in a nightclub, in the wee hours. His moves are awkward. It is the nadir of dad-dancing, impossible to unsee. Yet he doesn’t care who is watching; indeed, someone is surreptitiously filming him. The clip will later go viral because he is one of the most influential politicians in the UK over the past decade. He is a British cabinet minister, the political fixer Michael Gove. And he was filmed in an Aberdeen nightclub recently dancing blissfully by himself.

It should be excruciating. He was roundly mocked. This man’s politics are not mine yet I’m no knocker. Because there is something so joyous, and beautiful, and deeply human about the episode. A snapshot of these strange times. Gove is going through the trauma of divorce and his country has embraced living with Covid-normal after the tragedy of a huge death toll. He’d gone into the nightclub alone, a courageous act in anyone’s book. And he danced like no one was watching – which was patently not the case.

There was something so bravely vulnerable about it. It reminds me that when the time comes Australians will also celebrate post-lockdown freedoms in our own particular, joyful, revealing ways. “The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth,” philosopher Georges Bataille wrote. Perhaps now, on the cusp of Australia’s new living-with-Covid existence, we’ll soon be displaying our own reckless needs to go astray. Do we dare to eat a peach? So many of us have been living in retreat, beaten down by the wily health tsunami that’s upended all our lives. It’s time, soon, to throw away cautious living. Can you feel the impending glee?

“Joy is not made to be a crumb,” Mary Oliver wrote in her prose poem, Don’t Hesitate. We humans are so strangely good at creating misery for ourselves, at inflicting it on others and passing it on to younger generations. Why? Because we’re so unhappy in ourselves, perhaps. Why? And now, burstingly, at this pivotal time in history, it feels like we’re ready for something else. Will something akin to the Roaring Twenties take hold in this fulcrum into a new era; will there be a celebration of vivid living for years to come? I’m ready for the muscularity of another way of life, the recklessness of a new way. Want to be at the coalface of living – exuberantly, joyously, lightly – in the time I have left. Am sick of living in retreat.

Bring on a Covid baby boom; new futures, fresh starts. Bring on the medicine of maskless laughter and foreign places and weddings of abundance and warm handshakes and hugs; bring on the optimism and fearlessness of dancing alone in a nightclub. “Exuberance is beauty,” said William Blake, and as humans, we’re all bound by a common, humble hope – to live, and to experience pleasure, amid beauty.

Over the past 18 months a cautiousness has closed over us and it is almost time to throw the shackles off. I don’t want to under-live anymore; cannot wait to be enchanted again by life on this planet. Can feel a gleeful exhilaration in the air as more and more of us are vaccinated. Am grateful for everyone who’s stepped up; for the unselfish, collective good of it.

Michael Gove. Picture: Getty Images

Many of us getting on in life are ready to be young again. The brave are the ones who don’t care what others think, who’ll go to a restaurant or cinema by themselves for the sheer pleasure of it – or a nightclub in the wee hours, alone. Singer Emma Lament said she “couldn’t believe what she was seeing” when Gove rocked up. He was still there at 2.30am. “He really was enjoying himself, I don’t think he left the dance floor the whole time I was there.” Mary Oliver concluded, “If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.” Amen to that.