Most single lasses have one. The straight guy friend who’s like a brother. You love each other to pieces despite the fact he can’t braai for shit and you never approve of his girlfriends (they’re never good enough).

He is super protective, never forgets your birthday, doesn’t mind when you sing the wrong lyrics to his favourite songs and is always there for you. You wouldn’t dare try and have a relationship because well, eeeeuw, he’s like family.

My personal Wingman no longer lives in the same city as me, and he’s in a relationship with the most wonderful woman on earth (oh God, can’t wait for there to be a Swinger McG Junior, and I better be godmother)… But in my new city, as a collective troupe of monkeys, I have inherited the Male Monkey Wingman from my new girl monkey troupe.

He’s so lovely, we all agree. We all watch over him like a troupe of Jewish mothers (shame for any girl he tries to date). When he’s sober he’s fun and loves to teach us the rules of cricket or paintball. When he’s drunk… well, he becomes The Octopus. He never ever utters a single syllable to ANY of The Troupe about wanting a smidgen of a relationship with any of us, and hasn’t ever, but when we’re out and any of us are on the pull- well, he spreads out his tentacles and becomes the Anti-Wingman. He _doesn’t_ want to assist our romantic flirtatious endeavours whatsoever. Instead, he jeopardises everything by wanting to dance like Patrick Swayze all around and upside us and generally frightening off any potential candidates. (If he had a speech bubble, it’d say “these are my ho’s, bro’s, back off”.)

Recently, I’d had enough.

I hadn’t been surrounded by that much talent in a very sad long time. I wasn’t going to let any multi-limbed creature rain on my parade. Instead, in between losing myself to Wham! And Madonna classic tunes, I found myself shimmying up to English James. Twee, funny and about as talkative as you can be over 5 speakers. He wasn’t attracted to me, but my blonde Amazonian friend. I wasn’t attracted to him, but the man on his left, dancing like no-one was watching. So, an interesting thing happened. We became each others’ Wingpeople.

On that sacred dancefloor, we exchanged pep talks and banter to spruce each other up into the boxing ring, so to speak. We represented each other to the respective candidates. Then, we passed the torch.

Unfortunately, only one of us was successful.

I’m meeting Mr Dance-Off for dinner on Friday. Good on ya, English James!