‘Violence of any kind will not be condoned,’ Jeremy said firmly. ‘If unwelcome touching continues, please come back here and inform either myself or Mary on the bag check-in. There is a night-vision camera installed in the disco for your safety although it will only be looked at if we have any complaints.’

‘Yeah, this sounds like it’s going to be a right barrel of laughs,’ I whispered to Sumi. ‘How did you even hear about it?’

‘Wait until you get in there, it’s amazing,’ she replied while Jeremy placed neon wristbands on everyone’s wrists. Mine was orange. Sumi’s was pink. We immediately switched. ‘John brought me and Ade a few months ago, I think one of his friends runs it? We had to drag John out at the end, you wouldn’t think it but he’s the full Saturday Night Fever. Surprisingly good dancer for a tall man.’

Jeremy clapped his hands loudly. ‘Are we all ready to disco in the dark?’

Everyone cheered with varying degrees of enthusiasm and a second pair of black curtains opened, leading through to a pitch-black room where the party was already well under way. The bass thumped so loud, I could feel it vibrating from the floor, through the slender heels of my shoes and up my legs. My chest pounded with the music as my heartbeat was forced into a new rhythm.

‘Sumi?’ I yelled, totally thrown by just how dark it really was. ‘Where are you?’

‘Just dance!’ she shouted back. ‘Just let go!’

I watched her orange neon bracelet drift away from me, bobbing up and down as she air-punched her way across the dance floor.

I loved dancing as much as the next person, in that I danced when I was drunk or heard a Beyoncé song. When I was a teenager, we made up routines to every song on the charts and practised them until there wasn’t a single drop of joy left in Britney Spears’s entire back catalogue. Even two decades on, I couldn’t hear ‘Hit Me Baby, One More Time’ without bursting into the exact choreography we’d recorded off Top of the Pops. I couldn’t put an exact date on when we stopped going dancing every weekend – one minute we were hobbling home with our arms around each other, barefoot with our shoes in our hands, and the next we were putting each other in taxis and saying goodnight right after dinner. Maybe it was when we realized half the girls in the club were a clear decade younger than us, or maybe when working all week and going out all weekend became too much for our bodies to handle. And for some of my friends, a night at home was much more appealing when there was a significant other waiting for them there.