The Dancin'

“Time is a tangle in her head”

We sit, she indoors, me by the door of her conservatory.

“Am I going a bit doolally, David?”

“Of course not. We all forget things!”

With some older folk, the memory of things fifty years ago are vivid and precise while they can’t remember what they were talking about 10 seconds ago. The dancing is a case in point. For various cultural reasons, working-class Scottish folk were ‘dancin’ daft’ back in the day.

It was where you met your future husband or wife. If you were a bloke you ‘goat a lumber’ and you walked her home and if you ‘clicked’ you saw her again and so it went. The dancing was like a dating agency only it existed in a smoky world and there was crinoline involved.

Auld Margaret here met ‘her man’ at the dancing in Edinburgh. My own ma and da met at the dancing in Glasgow. She tells me she and her pal, both from The Colonies off Leith Links, would go to The Plaza up in Morningside their logic being that they were likely to meet a better class of man up there, and so it proved. Margaret married a polis who rose up the ranks to become an Inspector like Rebus.

I think my own ma and da met at The Locarno on Sauchiehall Street and their second ‘date’ was at The Barrowland where my da was due to sing in a competition.

“See if your da had been rid-rotten, son?”

“Aye, maw”

“You and yer brother widnae be here”

Me and wee Alan exist because of a cultural phenomenon and the fact my da could hold a tune!