Filmed in one of those shabby, dilapidated-yet-once-grand Havana buildings, it’s easy to miss how great this is (if you didn’t read the title), because of the lack of an audience and the very plain dress of the dancers – just crisp white cotton dresses for women and shirts and trousers for guys.

But watch for more than a minute and you’ll see what I mean. Unbelievably cool, stylish Cuban dancers full of AZUCAR! and SABOR! and incredble choreography.

Watching this, frankly, makes me feel like:
a) I have basically wasted my life so far by not being able to dance like this, with people like this.
b) The rest of my life will be wasted if I don’t drop everything so that I can dance like this, with people like this.

Not saying I HAVE wasted my life, or that I am about to drop anything. I’m just saying how it makes me feel.

If you adore Cuban salsa, you will understand. Also how badly it makes me want to go back to Cuba. WAHHH!

My event is on Wed 21st – sold out, I’m surprised and impressed to see. It’s a heck of a marketing machine, the Edinburgh Festival. Most of the Schools Events are sold out.

I have been getting my multimedia stuff up to scratch, cutting DVDs of my videos and rejigging my Powerpoint slideshow with one new slide – all about 2012. Apart from that, I have now booked my schedule solid between seeing friends who are visiting the Festival and hanging out at parties and lunches with my lovely publishers.

And I’m flying there! I will feel rather fabulous…

Meanwhile my sister has made us all very proud by giving birth to a bouncy boy, Benedict. I’m seriously thinking of going to his christening, all the way in Australia. Since we all live so many squillions of miles away from each other, my brother and sisters, these sorts of events are starting to be the kinds of excuses we can use to justify the increasingly terrifying expense of meeting up.

But maybe Scholastic Australia would like me to do some book events and schools visits….

That makes it much more justifiable, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile despite some very good news (apart from a new nephew) – which I’ll share in the next few weeks – I’m feeling rather melancholic. It’s been far too long since I went dancing – not since the Oscar D’Leon concert on July 12th. I think the doctor may order a trip to Mambocity soon. Damn salsa for being so addictive! I’m good and hooked.

Listened to BBC Radio 4 last night; Grevel Lindop reading from his book Travels On the Dance Floor - also on listen again. For a UK-based salsera like me his experiences are very familiar. It made me think nostalgically of Cuba. Especially when he played a song which played often when we were in Cuba. Whenever I hear it I feel a kind of desperate, romantic ache for Havana.

Well I listened to the lyrics, searched for the first line on Google and found this video: it’s the late guajiro Polo Montanez singing “Un Monton de Estrellas“.

Very romantic song. And turns out he’s dead – in a traffic accident in 2002, when he was 47. *sob*

I NEED TO DANCE TO THIS SONG SOON OR I WILL BURST!

Seems implausibly cold now…an artic breeze in blowing through my window at exactly the right angle to torment my wrist, which already throbs with strain from typing and the computer mouse.

I dreamt such a great idea for a story last night. I really should have written it down but as usual I thought it so vivid on waking that I wouldn’t need to. But as ever, an hour or so later and all I remember are fragments. In the dream I was shown a photo of a bunch of people who were known to have been behind the funding of a particular scientific project – a project that later had was found to have sinister connotations. The photo was an unexpected capture of all the suspicious parties together. And those faces were indeed surprising. I could identify some of them from my scientist days. One in particular was someone I hadn’t liked at all. In the dream, I had that delicious thrill of Aha!….followed by hmmmmm…

I’ve forgotten all the details, except the faces of the scientists that I recognised.

That’s right guys. I know who you are. I’ve seen ya!

Ah well, back to the manuscript.

Charanga Habanera in London

Ah, the lovely boys of Charanga’s front line. Cuba’s finest, playing for free in Southwark Park.

We missed them by two days in Havana…and also in Cancun. Well worth the wait…rumour has it they’ll be at the afterparty later tonight at the Colosseum in Vauxhall. This is where it really would be an advantage to be JK Rowling. People in their 20s adore her…they grew up on her books. Bet she’d get to dance with anyone from Charanga she likes.
Well I’ll still try my luck…
Emailed from my BlackBerry®

Watching her performance, I said to my friend Becs, “Is it just me, or would you give up all your education and job and talent in exchange for being able to dance like Yanet.” Becs considered. “I’d pretty much sell my soul to be able to dance like that.”

It would be a very reasonable deal. Yanet is extraordinarily good and has trained since being a little girl with top dancers in Havana. And she’s risen to be the best of the lot!

Now if Mephistopheles happens to be around, let’s talk. It would be the end of the adventure stories, probably. But look at what I would gain…

Well, what do you suppose a newly launched debut author does in the first week after her book is out…?

About a year ago I imagined I’d be walking around rather light-headed, visiting bookshops and placing my book somewhere more prominent… And the rest of the time sort of basking in a glow of happiness.

Well, guess what?

I actually AM doing quite a bit of that! (Although they’ve done really well with the book placement – it’s on tables and face out everywhere that I’ve seen. Yay!)

But my hard-working agent is also seeing to it that I’m not entirely frittering away my time eating cream scones, bagels and ice-cream and watching TV. He’s had me thinking of and writing articles for the super-whizzy new fan site that he’s developed at www.themgharris.com

Why did we call it that? Cos mgharris.com is taken and there is more than one MG Harris…

(although I bet there isn’t another Maria Guadalupe Harris but, yanno…drat, I just checked and there ARE!)

So check it out and maybe even join up!

In other news, in Cuba Fidel Castro has ‘resigned’ as El Presidente For Life, Glorious Dictator and Supreme Revolutionary Commandante (or some such overblown title). I guess we’ll have to wait until he checks in by phone with one of his best buddies like French movie actor Gerard Depardieu, to find out if he’s really still alive at all.

He’s put his brother Raul Castro in charge. Cubans have been waiting a long time to see Fidel die or stand down. They have a lot of patience, those people.

My favourite new song from a Cuban band is the brilliant rock/african/funk/salsa fusion track Asere que vola?, by Spain-based Cubans, Habana Abierta.

It’s jazzy, rock and funk, but you sure can dance to it – salsa and reggaeton. ‘Asere que vola?’ translates roughly as ‘Mate, what’s going on?’, but as usual in the translation of colourful street slan, it loses all the sparkle.

The lyrics tell of the news a guy receives from his Cuban mates all over the world – as he asks them via chat, email etc – ‘Asere, que vola?’. It’s cheerful, joyful, ironic, full of wonder at the outside world (I heard that in Denmark it’s brutally cold!) that these lucky young Cubans find themselves in…because most Cubans can only dream of seeing the rest of the world. But as always with Cubans outside Cuba, there’s sorrow and homesickness for the island.

A young Cuban hip-hop band (Don Dinero) have done a remix of Celia performing the old Cuban classic song ‘Son De La Loma’ (They’re From La Loma).
(Or as these guys put it – Unless they’re from the Yuma, in which case they speak English)

Celia Cruz is one of my favourite musicians of all time, with a career that spanned 50 years, singing at the height of latin jazz and salsa for most of that time. I was lucky enough to see her perform live a few years before she died. I got the tickets at very short notice so took our first-born daughter, then aged seven. It was at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire Theatre and we were there early enough to dash to the front. Jose Alberto (‘El Canario’) from Puerto Rico was supporting and we managed to hold on to our front row position through his terrific act (I LOVE Jose Alberto!). And then Celia came on, aged almost 80, wearing a huge, gleaming blonde wig. She sang and danced with energy that would put most 40-year olds to shame! At one point she asked the audience what they wanted to hear. “La Guagua” (The Bus), people yelled. Celia glanced at her band. “They’ll have to read it from the music…” she said a little apologetically.

A couple of years later Celia became ill from a brain tumour and died. She was unforgettable and I’ll bet we’ll never see her equal.

It’s good to see these young Cuban gangstas pay tribute to their musical origins.

My favourite line from these rappers is:
Celia…Guantanamera…We miss you and we love you.

Celia… I REALLY miss you.

Finally, I get to have my daiquiri en La Floridita*.

In honour of…oh who needs a reason…we went to celebrate, dinner & dancing with friends at London’s La Floridita.

It’s a fancy restaurant/bar/dance club that features the finest examples of Cuban music, and a big variety of rum-based cocktails, including my favourite, the delicious daiquiri. I tried three different ones and they were pretty, pretty, pretty good.

The band was El Guayabero, an excellent son group from Holguin on the eastern side of the island. They played 30-min sets of up-tempo son numbers with some boleros and cha-cha-chas mixed in. No one danced for the first two sets – maybe the people at the bar were shy? Others like us were scoffing down food yummier and more luxurious than you’ll find anywhere but in the very fanciest restaurants in Cuba.

The first time we ever went to Floridita was in January, for my friend Becs’s birthday. That was before we’d been to Cuba (Becs had been many times), before we realised that Floridita is like an idealised, fantasy version of Cuba. In reality I didn’t see anywhere in Cuba that looked anything like this. It’s the levels of consumption – no-where we went in Cuba looked this fancy, certainly not the type of places bands like this play (excluding Varadero – the tourist-only enclave, which I didn’t visit.) In our experience bands like Guayabero play to sweltering, smoky rooms with ineffective celing fans, and the dance floor heaves with expert Cuba couples and salsa tourists being taken for a spin by their Cuban insrtuctors.

During the third set, when we were moved off the table (you only get a 2-hour sitting on busy nights) and back to the bar, we decided to go for it on the dance floor. One couple had just taken the floor. Within seconds of us joining them the dance floor filled. The musicians looked utterly delighted. It must be a drag for a dance band to play to a motionless audience.

However, salseros, whilst the music and atmosphere are romantic and evocative (if not authentic), the drinks are wonderful and the food delish, it is not a cheap night out… And like us, you will probably still need to factor in a visit to a salsa club for a proper dance fix.

We went on to Salsa Republic@Club Colosseum, where the music of Maikel Blanco, Manolito, Issac Delgado, Adalberto and Los Van Van was as ever, wall-to-wall and sizzling hot.

P.S. Inexplicably, a photo of Becs and I dancing at the Manolito concert has rapidly risen to become one of my most viewed photos on Flickr. Is this blog to blame?

Let’s do the experiment. Here’s another MG & Becs dancing salsa photo – better quality, taken last night at Club Colosseum.

* the reference is to Hemingway’s habit of drinking “my daiquiri in La Floridita and my moijto in La Bodeguita” – two of Havana’s most famous bars. The line is quoted in one of Los Van Van’s most popular songs, “Tim Pop con Birdland“, a timba riff on the 1970s jazz classic “Birdland”. For those who are interested in such things, I reckon “Tim Pop con Birdland” may well be my keeper on a Desert island Disc selection…

I wasn’t alive in the days of Beny More (pronounced More-ray), the Cuban singer and band leader who went to live in Mexico and became a massive influence on all the Cuban salsa bands.

So why do I get these gorgeous pangs of nostalgia when I listen to Beny More? Why does it make me think of a Cuba and a Mexico I never even knew?

My theory is that as a tiny child I was exposed to this music. I do know that after my mother left my father, I spend a great deal of time with my two grandmothers. One, Abuelita Josefina (known to her old friends as ‘Pepa’) had a wonderful memory for lyrics and knew many of the songs of Beny More. Beny More often appeared in popular Mexican films, which went through a golden age in the 40s and 50s.

So maybe that’s it; maybe I was sat for hours in front of the TV while my grandmother knitted (she was mad for knitting). Maybe that’s where I acquired this overwhelming craving for gorgeous night clubs where Cuban bands play for beautiful people, sipping daiquiris between dancing the son, mambo and cha-cha-cha.

This Cuba does not exist anymore – I’ve been to look for it. It’s all timba and reggaeton now. That’s great, but, ah nostalgia. I once spent a whole afternoon lying next to a pool in Santiago de Cuba, listening to the piped music of Beny More. That’s as close as I got.