Spent hours and hours on the couch with two twenty-something men on New Year’s Eve.
No, really. Hours of heavy breathing and exploring a latent but potent foot fetish.
I had met them briefly before and was rather taken, but time pressure and things to do got in the way of a good time.
But on New Year’s Eve, I was trapped on the couch with time and a heavily sedated dog on my hands. Counting down the long hours and keeping Zeus zonked before D-Day exploded. The poor guy, at 60-odd kg and solid muscle, becomes a trembling, slobbering lapdog when a car backfires.
He’s spent more time on drugs this summer than Timothy Leary et al because, you know, thunder. His terror makes me terrified he’ll have a heart attack and I’ll have to go postal on the neighbourhood in revenge. If it was the lawful half-hour or so after midnight, we’d do better. But because some asshats pop bangs throughout the day, his nerves had to be nuked for the whole day, night and next day.
So while one hand was busy soothing and pacifying Zeus, the other was scrolling and there they were: the Gardiner Brothers.
They are Irish tap dancers. That is the understatement of the century. They were doing the breathing and it wasn’t that heavy considering their exertion. I was holding mine in awe.
If I could get off the couch and perchance bump into them in the flesh, I would perhaps recognise their faces. But I couldn’t pick up their feet at all. That, if they became concerned about the loop-playing stalker on social media, should explain the hundreds of times the videos were repeated endlessly. Any investigation would lead to an old fart whose granny was the closest thing that passed for a dance class. A little book on ballet, and granny telling me to pull in my bum and tum and point those toes. That was 50 years ago. I sucked.
But these two, Michael and Matthew, are truly mesmerising. They were making their names in the Riverdance troupe when Covid hit and the stage was pulled out from under them. So they put on their dancing shoes, picked up their little dance “boxes” and went out to shoot shorts for social media. They were soon flying as fast as their feet do.
Part of their popularity is the broad range of music they dance to – everything from classic Irish to Eminem to Elvis to Michael Jackson to Queen and the Eurythmics. They post tutorials, showing each step sloooowly and then doing it at their speed which is just ridiculous. The two versions are not the same. Believe me: I watched them so many times to try to see what they did there. I finally went to bed, exhausted, at about 3am.
All the links have been saved so I can get my fix whenever I want.
It is said you’ll make time for what it is you really want to do. Now that I’m an obsessive stalker, I’ll second that. Just know few feet, or lungs, can keep up with these two.
- Lindsay Slogrove is the news editor.
The Independent on Saturday