Academy of flirting

CAPE TIMES, 12 JULY 2002

I AM ALWAYS LOOKING for ways to make money. It is a family characteristic. Mad Uncle Roy spent some months in various international courts trying to enforce his patent on the wheel, and Grampa Ned depleted the family fortune trying to popularise ferret-racing as a professional sport (“Cheaper than a dog; more fun than a horse” was his motto, though sadly not anyone else’s).

Our ideas, admittedly, are not always good, but this time I have a winner. I am going to start a School of Flirting in Cape Town. That’s right, a School of Flirting. Or perhaps I will call it an Academy of Flirting. Academies are sexier than schools.

My academy will teach people to flirt. Flirting is an art, and like all arts it exists to make life more bearable. It adds sparkle to your day, pep to your stride. Unexpected flirting is like a shot of tequila, except afterwards it doesn’t cause you to shudder and make an unattractive face. At least, not if you’ve done it right. Flirting need not lead to anything – most often it doesn’t. Usually it is not intended to. It is simply a slight dance to distant music, a pas de deux of possibility that leaves both parties feeling better about themselves and about the potential of life to surprise us. (I hope I need not add that flirting does not involve surprising your colleagues with hearty hugs and kisses. At all times when flirting, and indeed when doing anything intimate, it is important to keep the image of Peter Marais far from your mind.)

Cape Town urgently needs an Academy of Flirting. Flirting is not big in Cape Town. There are plenty of kids in short skirts and tight T-shirts with saucy messages on the front, but that is not flirting. There are plenty of drunken businessmen wearing blue shirts and yellow ties and red faces willing to buy you drinks at pseudo-Irish bars on week nights, but that is not flirting either.

Flirting is an adult thing, and it doesn’t leer. It lies not in what is said, but in the spaces between. It is in that fine electric field that springs up between flirter and flirtee. (In the successful flirt, of course, flirter and flirtee take turns to change positions. If you know what I mean.)

The difficulty for my academy will be finding suitably qualified instructors. David Niven, say, or the younger Lauren Bacall. Personally, I am dead useless at flirting. When I try to flirt, I spend so much time thinking about what I should have just done that I forget what I should do next. A friend once tried to teach me. She had just returned from New York, where she had attended a Flirting Seminar. They have such things in New York. Frankly, they need them. New Yorkers are even worse at flirting than Capetonians. The difference is that New Yorkers are bad flirts because they are very busy. Capetonians are bad flirts because they don’t really like people.

My friend ran me through the flirting rudiments: the eye contact, the slight pause before speaking, the twinkling eye. I tried it, but my eyes bulged like Homer Simpson’s, and the slight pause before speaking made me resemble a Serbian war criminal listening to the translation in his earphones before deciding how to plead. “Why are you rolling your eyes?” demanded my friend.

“I’m trying to make them twinkle,” I said.

“You’re frightening me,” she said. “It’s horrible. Stop it.”

“I can’t!” I cried. “Once you start twinkling, you can’t just stop!”

So do come to my academy, dear reader. But don’t take that seat in the back row, left corner. That’s where I’ll be sitting.