Am I too old to start dancing?

No. And that is not a kind phrase: at any ordinary Tuesday social there are people in their twenties and people in their sixties dancing together, and nobody remarks on it because it is not news.

What is true is that almost everyone who turns up past forty expects to be the oldest person in the room. They almost never are. And the ones who are find out within ten minutes and stop thinking about it.

Muscle memory is slower. A step that takes two classes at twenty can take four at fifty. That is real and worth knowing, because the person who expects it does not get discouraged, and the one who does not expect it reads it as proof that they cannot do this.

In exchange, two things work in your favour and nobody mentions them. The first is patience: someone at fifty does not quit because one night went badly. The second is listening, which is literally half of partner dancing and the part that is hardest to teach.

And a third, practical one: people who start after forty tend to go more consistently. Turning up every week for six months gets you further than being twenty and going whenever you feel like it.

Your knees, as long as you do not force them. Social salsa and bachata ask for no jumps and no show turns: it is danced in a square metre, with the feet near the floor. What hurts people is turning the knee with the foot planted, and that happens to twenty-five-year-olds too.

Fitness is not an entry requirement. An hour-long class tires you about as much as walking briskly, and at a social you dance one song and sit out two.

And space on the floor is not handed out by age. It is handed out by who looks like they know what they are doing, which is a different thing.

With a beginners class, not a social. In a class everyone is being awkward at the same time and that levels things out; at midnight on a Saturday most people already know how, and that is intimidating for no good reason.

Midweek rather than weekend. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are for the people learning; Saturdays are for the people going out. They are two different rooms, and the first is far easier to walk into for the first time.

And if you can, a school with classes split by level rather than one class for everybody. Not for comfort: in a beginners group nobody is going to look at you for not knowing, because nobody knows.

Almost always the same thing in different words: that the first month was uncomfortable, and that the problem was not the body but the head. Walking alone into a room where you know nobody is hard at any age.

And that what fixed it was not learning faster: it was coming back the following week and recognising two faces. The scene is small and repetitive on purpose — after two months at the same place you stop being the new one.