Republic of Salsa delivered another great Cuban salsa party last night at Chorlton Irish Club. And anyone scared off by memories of the slippery, sweaty hell we all went through last time needn’t have worried: this time the air conditioning was perfect. Cool, in every sense.

Dark Magician: somewhere in his magic cave, Les mixes the music...

Les and Andy kept the floor hot with a great fuelling of salsa tracks, the new lights (think laser-red with interlacing patterns of intense green) were fabulous, and both movie-screens were flickering away to create atmosphere – Oliver Stone’s Castro documentary on one wall and Buena Vista Social Club on the other. Plus an interesting (?Cuban?) pop video I couldn’t identify. Where did you get that one, guys? The only factor missing was Lorraine, still on her camping holiday in Wales. Mil besitos, Lorraine, and hope you’ve got some sunshine! We missed you.

Les gets everyone dancing bachata

Les kicked off the evening with a great Bachata class, teaching a simple, classic routine that anyone could master but also felt like dancing real bachata. A huge confidence-boost for bachata-dabblers like me.

Before finishing I have to apologise to La Casa de la Salsa: I had wanted to go to the Ball on Friday but couldn’t make it for reasons beyond my control.  I’m sure it was fabulous. Next time I’ll get there.

Oh, and a final PS: Anyone wants to take pics off this blog, from this post or any other, go ahead and copy them (click your right mouse button to ‘copy’ then ditto to ‘paste’). it’s fine to use on FB if you want. Just please give a credit to www.grevel.co.uk – thanks!

Poet Angela Locke takes Rose and Poppy across the valley

Just back from a wonderful couple of days in Cumbria. The excuse was that Jeannie Pasley from Carlilse City Council had asked Cumbrian novelist and poet Angela Locke and me to go up and read poems for something called ‘Love Parks Week’.

I’d never heard of  Love Parks Week, but apparently it happens in lots of places around the country and puts on events in parks and other green spaces to entice people to come out and enjoy them more in the summer.

Our venue was the lawn right under the vast east window of Carlisle Cathedral, but it wasn’t daunting: everyone was very friendly, there was a great PA system that actually worked with a mic you could actually adjust, and Jeannie was there to greet us and get everything set up. Amazingly, the weather was perfect – cool but dry, turning (at times) warm and sunny. And we got a wonderful audience – people drifted in and out but the maximum was up to around 40, and many people stayed for the whole hour-and-a-half.

Angela Reads - under that towering east window!

It was lovely to read with Angela, a well-known local poet who has also just published a beautifully-written and deeply engaging travel book, On Juniper Mountain, about her travels in Nepal and how she came to found the charity Juniper Trust.

Afterwards I was able to spend some time with Angela and her husband Colin at their fine old house under the slopes of Bowscale Fell at Mosedale, near Penrith. We did some walking in the Mosedale Valley with the dogs and I was able to enjoy the gorgeous garden they’ve made in front of this beautiful traditional cottage – which was once painted by Sheila Fell, with L.S. Lowry in attendance. I have to say Lowry isn’t my favourite artist and even Fell gets pretty depressing, so the reality, with the warm evening light falling across the drifts of honeysuckle, was idyllic in a way that I definitely prefer, though neither artist would have countenanced it in their work!

Garden at Bowscale Cottage: drifts of honeysuckle, and Carrock Fell beyond

Anyway, a big Thank You to Carlisle City Council, and please invite me back! And thank you also to Angela and Colin, the perfect friends.

Oh, and for more about Love Parks Week and what might be on near you, go to http://www.loveparksweek.org.uk/

It was a superb salsa workout last night as local Latin bands Diaspora and Mojito put on dazzling performances as part of the Manchester Jazz Festival.

Diaspora keep the dancers happy

Diaspora (whom I hadn’t heard before) took us through a whole range of music including son and samba as well as salsa. They’re a big orchestra – 14-piece as far as I could count from where I was – with emphasis on brass, piano and vocals. The style is Latin jazz, not unlike the Alex Wilson sound if you’re familiar with that: some of it just forced you to get up and move, and all of it was highly listenable. I hope to hear a lot more of Diaspora.

Mojito hypnotises dancers with authentic Cuban goodtime music

As for Mojito, well, I’m fanatical about their music. If you’re not familiar with them, you might think at first that they’re less polished than the very slick Diaspora, but the fact is they have an inimitable Cuban texture and spontaneity: the music is chunkily percussive, the rhythms magical and muscular, and there’s a huge charm and humour in Damian’s singing. This is real intense Cuban good-time music and it has the hypnotic power of the Orishas, the flavour of Afro-Cuban spirituality inside it. There isn’t another band like Mojito around, and hence the huge following they’ve built up.

Sure enough, they progressively whipped up the audience into sweaty salsa heaven and their final number was a crazy tour-de-force of exuberant vocal gymnastics from Damian, utterly wonderful because he shares so much joy and has such a rapport with his audience.

One plea to the organisers – could we have a real dancefloor next time so the ladies don’t break their heels on the cobbles?

I just hope the Manchester Jazz Festival has won a host of new admirers for these two great Manchester bands – and maybe for salsa too.

Simon Bolivar: hero of Latin American independence

Bolivar was a great man in his way, and is a hero in several South American countries. With no military training, he became a brilliant strategist and led five countries – Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia – to independence. His great dream was a ‘united states of the Americas’ where all American countries would form a free federation.

Bolivar died of TB. But anyone who knows anything about Chavez can see where all this is leading. The ‘tests’ carried out on Bolivar’s body will reveal – guess what? That he was poisoned, either by the USA or more likely by the Colombians. Chavez has been having a border dispute with Colombia (which claims Colombian terrorists are being allowed to take refuge in Venezuela), and he will use the ‘results’ for propaganda, claiming that the Colombians poisoned Latin America’s greatest hero.

Of course no one will believe it. But it will give Chavez a chance to make trouble. Having failed a couple of years ago in his bid to pass a referendum that would let him be President for life, he’s been looking for other causes to take up, and a quarrel with Colombia over Bolivar will be one of them.

When I was in Caracas, there was a big exhibition in the City Hall there called ‘Caracas, Cradle of Liberty’. The building bore huge banners featuring the faces of Bolivar, Miranda (another nineteenth-century hero of the independence struggle) and – guess who? Hugo Chavez.

Chavez has been hijacking Bolivar’s name for a long time, calling his demagogic rule ‘Bolivarian Socialism’. By now, he probably believes that he is Bolivar. Rather than a socialist, he’s simply the latest in a long line of self-aggrandizing political bosses – what the Latin Americans call a caudillo.

It’s a disgrace that he’s dishonouring Bolivar in this way. And Bolivar’s family, who haven’t been consulted, are furious.  But it’s just part of the sad process by which political egoists descend into lunacy on the way to finally imploding.

Having written this, I probably won’t be allowed into Venezuela again. But having spent time in Caracas, which has become the most dangerous city in Latin America outside the border areas of Mexico, as well as the most polluted and traffic-ridden, I don’t think that’s too much of a problem. What Venezuela needs is Bolivar’s wide vision and generosity of spirit, not fake excuses for more tension.

Well, time to catch up. So much (too much) has happened! A couple of weekends ago I spent Saturday at Manchester’ Contact Theatre, taking part in UNSUNGFEST, an independent festival of art, poetry, performance and music. 

Matt Byrne, Festival Organiser Extraordinaire, de-stresses with a well-earned pint

It was a brave venture, organised by Matt Byrne, Justin Dooley and James Byrn. They took over the whole theatre space for the day and had a constant, rolling audience with people coming in and out throughout the day from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

My share was the 7 p.m. slot, reading poems with fellow Manchester poets Jon Glover and Linda Chase – both notable teachers of creative writing as well as local celebrities. It was a great session: Jon magisterial, reading his moving and nearly-surreal poems about adventures in America (snakes under the house!) and the weirdness of having MRI scans; Linda, chromatic in the spotlight with matching red shoes, hair and A4 binder, entertaining us with her sexy and colourful poems about love on the bohemian fringes of the US counterculture.

Jon Glover: impressive, moving, surreal

Before that I was able to catch a good set from Steven Waling and Simon Rennie (loved a line from his poem ‘Carbon Copy’ – ‘The cocooned insect dreams the same dream as the dozing philosopher’. I can imagine Blake coming up with that!) And a fine reading from the sensitive Helen Tookey, with her haunting, introverted poems coloured and perfumed by the Wirral seashore.

Out of the Shadows: Helen Tookey - a fine, sensitive poet

Matt organised the whole thing on a shoestring and it was an amazing achievement. Let’s hope he’s already planning next year’s FEST and that it won’t remain UNSUNG!

Castle Crag is full of caves and chasms

Back to the Lakes last week to give a talk to a group of Swiss students, mostly MA students studying English Romanticism. After a great day touring Dove Cottage and walking up Sour Milk Gill to Easedale Tarn I stayed on and went for a scramble around the slopes of Castle Crag near Keswick.

Slate cavern hewn at the base of Castle Crag

The Crag doesn’t look huge from the Grange-Seatoller path but it’s really a ridge, much larger and more intricate than it looks, full of gulleys, crags, fissures and caves. Its slopes on the east side are thickly forested and you can disappear in there for hours and get happily lost. You can spend hours and days exploring its mysteries. I took a long time trying to locate Millican Dalton’s cave but didn’t succeed. I’ve tried and failed before. If anyone out there can give me precise directions to find it, please get in touch. 

Red squirrel explores dense pine forest around the Crag

I spent a while meditating in a grassy natural balcony half way up one of the crags and became aware of rapid zig-zaggy movements in a nearby tree. Turning gently that way I soon saw a pair of red squirrels chasing each other madly in a pine tree, tearing in spiral paths up and down the trunk. Managed to ease the camera out and when they finally tired of the game one of them ambled over towards me. This was about its closest point.

Helm Crag from a How Foot bedroom

Amanda came up and joined me for the weekend, which we spent at How Foot Lodge in Grasmere. They gave us a room with a wonderful foliage-fringed window looking straight out to Helm Crag. They told me they have an unusual number of free rooms this year owing to the World Cup so now’s your chance to make a booking on impulse at this lovely and relatively inexpensive hotel: www.howfoot.co.uk

Bluebells cover the lower slopes of Loughrigg Fell

The weather was kind and we had a few great walks, including the circuit around Grasmere and Rydal Water. Sheets of bluebells were still floating their intense colour on the slopes of Loughrigg, making a wonderful contrast with the dead russet of the bracken.

No, it isn't a Julian Cooper painting: the rock contemplates its own face in the water

At the Rydal Cavern I disregarded the National Trust’s warning notice (what are the odds, really, of a chunk of rock dropping from the roof  exactly at the moment I’m standing directly underneath?) to go into this, one of my favourite spaces, and contemplate the mirrorimage of the hewn rock in the still floodwater. Of course I advise you not to do this, and if you go in there it’s at your own risk. Don’t sue me if you get flattened.

I spent Monday and Tuesday this week up in the Lakes for a reason I couldn’t have guessed in a million years.

The Swinside Inn: traditional Newlands pub with great food

I’d had an email, totally unexpected, to say that the Cumbria Blue Badge Guides were celebrating the 20th anniversary of the founding of their Association in the Swinside Inn, at Newlands near Keswick, where the organisation was originally set up. They were going to have a plaque to commemorate the occasion and they wanted me to unveil it!

What's the collective noun for a set of Blue Badgers?

I found this pretty hard to believe because I don’t see myself as the sort of person who goes around unveiling plaques. But it wasn’t a hoax. It turned out that the Guides (and no, they’re not Girl Guides, they’re the accredited tourist guides who take people on all kinds of tours, big and small, around the towns, villages, historic sites and mountains of Cumbria) have been using my Literary Guide to the Lake District as a resource, year in and year out. So they’d decided to invite me to do the business.

A clean slate. Plenty of space for the next 20 years

I met the Guides and their friends and partners, led by Nicky Godfrey-Evans, at the Swinside Inn around 6 pm. After drinks and talk, and a photo session outside the Inn, we got the plaque unveiled. It’s a fine slab of Cumberland slate, engraved with the ‘Blue Badge’ design and details of the date and the Association it commemorates.

I quickly found that the Guides are a remarkable group of people, from all sorts of backgrounds. Their training is rigorous and they’re all enthusiasts for Cumbria (and other parts of the North-West) with their own special interests and expertise. They take on everything from demanding fell walks to coach tours and (as you’d expect in the Lakes) every one is a strong and genial personality. So the bar was buzzing with energy, ideas and laughter.

What you see when you wake up

 The Swinside Inn is under new management and George and Judy treated us to a superb meal – absolutely first rate traditional Cumbrian food with a good range of choice. I stayed resolutely mainstream and I couldn’t have done better. The steak-and-ale pie was quite definitely the best I have ever tasted – tender, beautifully cooked and full of flavour; and the sticky toffee pudding (I had it with ice cream) was utterly delicious, and a satisfyingly huge helping as well.

I stayed overnight and was greeted with a fabulous view up the Newlands Valley towards Causey Pike in golden morning sunshine. Fabulous.

Seathwaite Farm, heading for Grains Gill

With the weather so good I wasn’t going to stay in the valley, so I went up to Seathwaite and walked up Grains Gill, then climed Scafell Pike. The air on the summit was icy but the rain and cloud held off and there was the whole of the Lake District, the Solway and the west coast with the Isle of Man on the horizon: everything misty green, gold and purple under a radiant blue sky.

Stockley Bridge, towards Seathwaite

If you’re walking in Newlands, do check out the Swinside Inn. And let’s hope for lots more fresh, sunny days like that as spring turns into summer.

It was a lesirely drive home, not least because some sheep were being moved from field to field at Lodore. They got

Looking back from Grains Gill

away from the dog and spilled all along the road, up side paths and into other people’s fields. One driver (not me) got out to stand and watch. Finally the shepherd came down with his dog. Unabashed, he took one look at the motorist and remarked, pointing at the other side of the road, ‘If ye’d've stood theer, ye’d've done sum gud.’ Quintessential Cumbrian remark!

Pedestrians made it a leisurely journey home

Ochun: the West African Venus

It perhaps happened because the previous year, when I was in Cuba,  I had had an initiation into Santería, the Afro-Caribbean religion. Maybe that opened a door somewhere. But the encounter with Ochún was completely unexpected and had a power all of its own.

The piece that follows was written for a Buddhist magazine, which posed the question of what relationship the Celtic Goddesses might have to Buddhism. This was my answer, with no apology for wandering away from the Celtic theme (though I did get Robert Graves in!). I repeat it here in love and gratitude to the Goddess who so kindly paid me a visit that night on the eve of May Day.

*

REFLECTIONS ON A COPPER MOON

I sit beside the dark, fast-flowing river, watching the disc of the full moon straight ahead. It has a reddish tinge; its light glitters on the surface of the water and casts shadows under the bushes beside me. Something darts from the undergrowth at my right. To my amazement it’s a black cat. It runs towards me and began to circle me clockwise. Others follow: dozens, hundreds of cats stream from the bushes. They run fast and they close in, dancing, brushing my skin with their fur, a whirlpool of black cats. Then, as suddenly as they appeared, they veer away and vanish into the forest.

I know I have to leave for my appointment with the woman. I’ve been told to wait in the house next door. Sure enough, a lovely slender woman with long hair comes in. She dances around me in a circle, close up, like the cats. But almost at once she’s gone. I know that I have to follow her now, to the house next door, her house. And as soon as I walk in I see her. But now she’s not alone. There’s a man with her, and a huge black dog. She smiles at me. She has something important to tell me. I think she’s speaking Spanish but I’m not sure. ‘This moon is the moon of copper,’ she explains. ‘Copper, because it comes between silver and gold.’ She gestures towards the man. ‘And now,’ she says, ‘you must kiss my companion.’

 I’m a bit troubled by this. But I needn’t worry. The man bends forward and gives me the slightest brush on the lips, a mere formality. We’re not finished yet, however. ‘Next,’ says the lady, ‘you have to kiss my dog.’ The dog is like a very large black Labrador. I have a dog at home and I like dogs. I guess I can tolerate kissing it. I bend down and look into its loving, dark brown eyes. The dog flickers its tongue out and gives me just the tiniest lick on my lips. No problem.

‘And now,’ says the lady, ‘you can kiss me.’ She pulls me towards her in her arms. This time it’s a real kiss. It’s delightful: she kisses me like a lover and I can feel the soft pressure of her tongue on mine. She smiles at me. ‘Look into my mouth,’ she says.

 She beckons me to come close again, and she opens her mouth. Something very strange happens. Her lower jaw seems to change shape, to elongate a little. There’s something not quite human about it. A piranha? A cayman? I peer into her mouth. I can see several things: a rounded stone pebble; a small cylinder of polished bone or ivory, about the size of a chessman; and, astonishingly, I can somehow see through the back of her throat: instead of flesh there is empty space, the sky, and in the midst of it the copper-coloured disc of the full moon.

She closes her mouth and her jaw returns to normal. Once again she is a beautiful, blonde woman. She holds me at arm’s length, a twinkle of amusement in her eyes, smiling as if to cheer up a favourite child. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘I’ll look after you.’

And I wake with a soundless crash, as if I had fallen into the bed from a great height. My heart is pounding, my scalp prickling. The pitch-dark room crackles with a weird energy, as if the whole place were charged with static electricity. Shakily I get out of bed and look for the light. I’m in a hotel room in Bogotá. I’ve just had one of the strangest dreams of my life, and I feel sure of one thing: it didn’t come out of my little personal psyche.

 I tell this story (it happened in April 2007) to show that even thirty years of Samatha practice may not immunise you against visitations from deities (or spirits or apparitions, call them what you like) who seem to have nothing to do with Buddhism. But then, I’ve always felt that the Buddha’s teaching takes for granted the existence of countless non-material beings – good, bad and mixed. The Wheel of Life, that popular image in the art of nearly all Buddhist traditions, shows the realms of the hungry ghosts, of the asuras or titans, and of the gods themselves. And Buddhist texts – even the supposedly ‘plain and simple’ Pali suttas – show just how rich and varied the realms of the gods are. In the Kevaddha Sutta, the Buddha describes a monk who wants to know where the four elements, earth, water, fire and wind cease and leave no trace behind. He develops his meditation and then, to ask his question, travels in turn to the heavens of the Four Great Kings, the Thirty-Three gods, the Yama gods, the Gods Who Rule Over Creation, the Gods Who Inspire the Creations of Others, and the Brahma realms.

Of course he doesn’t find the answer there, because the gods – though more beautiful and long-lived than we are – are no more enlightened than ourselves. The Buddha explains that the place where the elements (and even name and form) cease, is in the Enlightened mind, which is free of them all. But as for those gods, countless other Buddhist texts take for granted the existence of such beings. The biographies of numerous eminent meditation teachers confirm the same view, telling of how they met, talked and debated with deities of many kinds.

Whether we ‘believe’ in the existence of the gods is up to us, but at least we might keep an open mind. Certainly, the question of whether the specific gods and goddesses of the world’s religions – past, present and future – actually exist as ‘persons’ is a difficult one. Are Indra, Osiris, Quetzalcoatl, Aphrodite, Thor and all the rest of them wandering around somewhere in the spiritual cosmos at this very moment? Frankly, I don’t know. I suspect that it isn’t quite that simple. Such beings, if they do exist, certainly don’t have material form as we know it. Perhaps they are more like living centres of psychic energy. Perhaps they merge and separate – changing from one to many and back again – in ways we find hard to imagine. (Indeed, if there is any truth in Jung’s idea of the Collective Unconscious, there must be a viewpoint from which the whole of humanity is, in a sense, a ‘single’ person.) It may well be that human feelings – devotion, love, fear and so on – give the gods form, a kind of shape that enables our imaginations to grasp them, but also distorts them in the process. We see them, and imagine them, for the most part in terms of what we already know. What is not in doubt is that at times such beings – whether Celtic goddesses or Christian angels – can inspire us, bring us wisdom or protection, or, for that matter, trouble us. For we should always remember that the gods, if they exist, are not themselves enlightened. Like humans they may be wise or foolish, honest or deeply dishonest. Some are perhaps malicious: think of the asuras, the jealous titans who want to get into heaven by force, and who make war on the gods. I suspect that this category includes many of those so-called gods whom humans have ‘worshipped’ with human and animal sacrifice. The energy of the asuras corresponds to the mental states of kings and warrior-castes who live by violence and fear.

It was in 1944, towards the end of World War II, that one of the most dramatic irruptions of a ‘pagan’ deity into modern culture took place. The poet Robert Graves was then living in Devon. Age, and wounds from the previous World War, had led to his being turned down for war service, so he was writing and researching as usual. Suddenly he found himself taken over by a vast current of psychic energy, in which he unexpectedly began to see answers to several of the unsolved mysteries of Celtic culture. ‘My mind,’ he recalled later, ‘ran at such a furious rate all night, as well as all the next day, that it was difficult for my pen to keep pace with it. Three weeks later I had written a seventy-thousand-word book’ – which became the first draft of The White Goddess.

 The book began by examining a group of riddling early-Welsh poems which previous scholars had been unable to interpret with any confidence. Graves solved the riddles and deciphered the poems – to his own satisfaction – revealing them as records of the defeat of goddess-worship in Britain around 400 BC, and its replacement by patriarchy and the predominant worship of male gods.

Graves was convinced that the inspiration for his book came from the Muse Goddess, the moon-goddess or ‘White Goddess’ who, he came to believe, was the object of all pre-patriarchal religion. He believed that he owed his poetry to her, and that she had inspired all the true poets of the past. He was also convinced that society would return to her worship in the future, after the breakdown of male-dominated industrial civilisation. Not that this was necessarily an entirely pleasant prospect, for Graves also thought that the Goddess had her cruel aspects. She might demand human sacrifice, and would certainly make people suffer.

His urgent sense of inspiration, and the fascinating book it produced – eventually published as The White Goddess in 1948 – were undoubtedly real enough. To Graves the Goddess was an actual entity; and she has become an inspiring presence in the lives of many people who have read his book. A whole host of Pagans and enthusiasts for a ‘Celtic’ culture based more on the Romantic imagination than on archaeological evidence have followed in Graves’s footsteps. But has the White Goddess really anything to do with the religion of the Celts (about which in fact we know very little)? Probably not. The Goddess, as Graves depicted her, is surely shaped in the terms of the modern imagination. She is a composite goddess, made up of aspects from a wide range of ancient goddesses from Europe and the Middle East, and mixed with Graves’s personal quirks – he was something of a masochist, and the idea of a cruel goddess had a special appeal for him.

Academic scholars of Celtic culture have rejected almost all Graves’s interpretations – whilst continuing to delight in the stream of students who come to enrol for Celtic Studies after being inspired by his book. Yet though Graves may not have produced reliable interpretations of early Welsh poetry, he certainly created an imaginative world and a system of symbolism which has proved powerful and enduring.

And even that is not the whole story. Not only do the complexity and intensity of The White Goddess show it as an exceptionally rich book, a staggering creative feat. It also introduced ideas of feminist spirituality at a time when these were hardly discussed in western culture, and it warned of an ecological crisis which almost no one else in the 1940s could foresee. Where did all this come from?  If Graves felt that his work had been galvanised by a visiting intelligence which took him far beyond what he could have done unaided, perhaps he was right – even if his vision of that intelligence was shaped and distorted by his own personality. Certainly for me it is hard to reconcile the idea of a goddess who inspires poetry, love and scholarship with the vision of a cruel female deity thirsting for blood. And yet again, I am checked by the thought that the compassionate deities of Tibetan tradition have their wrathful aspects. The riddle remains.

 I wrote above about ‘living centres of psychic energy’, and perhaps this is the best formulation I can find. It was surely one of these that Robert Graves encountered. Whether such entities dwell in higher cosmic realms, in the individual psyche, or in the ‘Collective Unconscious’ proposed by Jung, is something we could argue about endlessly. Certainly, if I understand the suttas correctly, the Buddha implies that we can at times contact such beings in meditation.

 I have no idea whether The White Goddess is accurate in its explorations of Celtic culture – the secret lore of the tree alphabet, the interpretation of the Battle of the Trees as a poem about the overthrow of matriarchal culture, and all the rest of it. But it is a book that casts a powerful spell. I discovered it at sixteen and have never ceased to be fascinated by it. The opportunity to produce a new and more accurate edition of it in 1997 was a delight and an honour for me, a chance to repay something of the debt I felt I owed to the book, and to Robert Graves, for a lifetime of inspiration. And beyond the book itself, I also cherish the notion of an inspiring goddess, one who has many faces and turns up in many cultures, who shows herself to me at certain moments in the woman I love, and who every so often may give an extra touch of magic to a poem I write. I don’t have any feeling that she demands human sacrifice. As far as I’m concerned, impermanence, old age, sickness and death will see to that anyway.

For me the Goddess has a certain reality, as a helper, a friend, someone living on a different plane from me but still a part of samsara, destined no doubt in the end to die and be reborn into this human world, even if she perhaps doesn’t yet know it herself. So I felt honoured as well as amazed that she – or one of her aspects – paid me that startling visit on my first night in Colombia. And I felt sure that someone who knew the local Afro-Caribbean religion would be able to tell me more about her.

I found a babalawu – a shaman – in the Yellow Pages (easy enough in South America) and went to tell him about my dream. ‘The lady you dreamed of was Ochun,’ he told me, ‘the goddess of the river, of the moon and of copper. She granted you a vision of herself. The three kisses were three tests which she set you, and you passed them. She is telling you that she loves you and will take care of you.’ The babalawu advised me to get a picture of Ochun, and told me that when I got home I should offer her five eggs, five candles and five yams.

I took his advice. In Panama City not long afterwards I noticed a shop with a sign that said ‘Esoterica’. I went in, and asked if they had a picture of Ochun. Yes, indeed, I was told, and the lady behind the counter gave me a little plastic-covered Catholic picture of Our Lady of Charity of Copper – a miraculous statue of the Virgin Mary enthroned in Cuba on a mountain where copper was mined, and who is now honoured as the patroness of Cuba. In my picture she floats above the water, on a crescent moon, in a blue robe just the same shade as the dress she wore in my dream. To the Catholics she is the Blessed Virgin; to followers of Santería, the Afro-Caribbean religion that grew up amongst the slaves of the New World, she is Ochun; perhaps to Robert Graves she would have been an aspect of the White Goddess.

I don’t know what she will do with the eggs and the yams, bless her, but I enjoyed offering them to her. They’re near me as I write, on a small table, in two dishes, with a couple of candles, in front of my little picture of Ochun –  alias Our Lady of Charity of Copper, alias, perhaps, the White Goddess. In a day or two I shall take them out, as the babalawu instructed me, and leave them in a forest somewhere. But right now it’s time for me to do my meditation and try to take another tiny step on the path that leads beyond the gods, those fellow-travellers of ours on the path to enlightenment.

(A fuller version of these events and what followed them is told in my book Travels on the Dance Floor).

At last I’m in paperback. My book Travels on the Dance Floor has just appeared in the new format – and at half the price! – from publishers Andre Deutsch.

I’m pleased that they’ve kept the same funky, deeply colourful, slightly gritty look for the cover design (a bit pale in this jpeg – the one at right is more accurate!) – I wanted it to reflect the look of the beautiful, battered buildings of Cuba and other Latin American cities, where nothing is pristine, but the used-and-abused look only adds to the charm of the cityscape.

But they have added a corner-flash saying that Travels was listed as Authors’ Club Dolman Best Travel Book 2009 – something I’m very proud of, even though the actual prize was won by a more scholarly tome. It was a very short short list, believe me.

What has delighted me even more than the listing has been the wonderful response I’ve had from readers – and by no means only from people who dance. People still come up to me in the street, at parties, at literary events, or they email me, to tell me how much they enjoyed it. Typical comments have been ‘I tried to read slowly because I couldn’t bear it to finish.’ ‘It was written so beautifully that I could see everything in my head like a movie in full colour.’ 

Hector - Panama City bus artist

Am I boasting? Of course. But I’m also full of gratitude that I’ve been able to give readers so much enjoyment. A matter of sharing the delight I myself took in the adventure.

Travels sometimes gets referred to as my ’salsa book’, but the truth is that I used dance as a way into Latin American and Caribbean culture generally: a way to get close to people, to learn from them, to explore the sides of these countries that the tourists don’t get to see.

I travelled through Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and ended up in Miami, Fla. I took lessons in the local dance styles in each country, and I explored the clubs and dance halls. I met magicians and pagan priests, policement and prostitutes, poets and musicians. I met a guy who made a living painting pictures on the sides of buses, an haute couture designer,  and several lunatics. All of them were fascinating. And I met them pretty much on equal terms. I got robbed, I got arrested, I got lost, and I had the most wonderful time – better than I could ever have imagined.

Aïda: her Colombian smile brightened stressed-out Caracas!

I fell in love with these countries, their music, their culture and their people. And since I wrote the book with total honesty – and absolutely no regard for political correctness - I have to say that I fell in love above all with Latin American women, surely some of the most beautiful in the entire world. You will meet many of them in the book, and I hope you’ll be as enchanted by them as I was.

Whether or not you dance salsa, tango or anything else, enjoy!

Les mixes the sounds with a little help from Che

Mancuban’s Republic of Salsa provided another amazing night out in Chorlton on Saturday.  As this alternate-monthly club night gets better known, more and more people from the friendly Manchester salsa scene are arriving and it’s becoming a huge gathering of friends that gives a warm welcome to newcomers and old amigos/amigas alike.

Typical last night was the fact that there were Cuban-style salsa teachers from all over the country, and along with them a number of people who’d never danced salsa before. That’s how good, and how eclectic, it is.

Stars together: Mohito's Damian, Mancuban's Lorraine

There was the usual fine DJing from Les, Lorraine and Andy (no congas this time, but a notably Afro tinge to the music as the night got later) and Lorraine kicked off the evening with a great warm-up session followed by an enormous rueda that stayed interesting but was straightforward enough for even the beginners to handle it.

Noel takes a break from giving Inverness some Cuban heat

Teachers I spotted included Noel (from Cuba, but currently teaching in Bury and Ramsbottom – check out www.almacubana.co.uk  ), Paris, Pauline, Mike and Jordan from SolarSalsa, as well as Damian (courtesy of Northwich Salsa and bands Mohito and Cafe Con Leche).

Good to see that the movies projected on the back wall have returned (in fact there were two, one behind the DJ deck and another oppsite the bar) though the current projection method isn’t quite doing them justice: to be worthwhile they need to be bigger, and flat (not coming up at an angle so the end product is trapezoid in shape). A few details to be ironed out there, maybe.

But yet again music and atmosphere were second to none. If you’re committed to Cuban, want a workout to the best music going with the friendliest people around, or simply looking for a great night out, this is the one to catch. Next opportunity will be 5 June.