Colm O'Regan: dancing in the social double-bubble

We are told we are now in the era of the social double-bubble. Experts encourage us to metaphorically put our car keys in a bowl, pick another couple and stick to that choice. It may not be possible for everyone either through reasons of accessibility or just not really liking anyone enough to make them your Significant Other House.

So self-reliance is still very important even as restrictions relax. We still need external help to pepper the time with Stuff To Do.

This led us recently to sign up for a Family Dance Party: Namely, dancing with other families over Zoom. In one screen the DJ played songs from our single days. On paper it sounds awful. Watching strangers watching you and then throw in the appalling vista of sober dancing. This was going to be weird.

But, what was actually weird is that it didn’t feel weird. It felt like we had all entered into a contract. We had all brought something to the table – a willingness to act the eejit – and therefore the amount of self-consciousness you would feel In Da Club – wasn’t there. There was no one watching from the bar laughing at us. Or if there were, we could not see them. You don’t know what people are snickering off camera but what we didn’t know didn’t bother us.

Not all the screens are visible. Some people have chosen not to reveal themselves to strangers. There is probably a very innocent explanation for that but I’m choosing to believe they were burglars casing multiple houses. Or the Criminal Assets Bureau checking for signs of a swimming pool and a panic room in a mid-terraced former Corpo gaff.

The screens were all nice and small. They gave the indication of being there but not too exposed. Until I spotted that our webcam was angled in such a way that you could see our toilet through the open door, revealing the towels in a heap. No problem. I danced a child smoothly up to the door and pulled the door closed with a macarena hand movement.

At no point did someone barge through our sitting room coked out of their bin. I mean you wouldn’t be expecting that at a Kiddie’s Disco anyway. At least not yet. Who knows though? I have seen the way the country’s going. I’ve seen Normal People.

Speaking of which, it was also a nice way of seeing other people’s normality. One father spent the whole hour just doing airplanes with his daughter. In another screen, two small brothers appeared to be just wrestling and throwing slaps as if enacting a pastiche of an adult nightclub.

I lost myself in the music of the early 2000s. They had cannily aimed the playlist squarely at the parents’ age-group. It allowed us to recapture our 20s, that first heady thrill of when pesto and Sophie-Ellis Bextor arrived in Ireland in the same month. Robert Miles’ dance choon ‘Children’. What a banger. I couldn’t stand it at the time but when the DJ lined it up on our Family Dance Party, the memories of queuing for four hours for a taxi came flooding back.

At one point the children disappeared from shot, trying to wreak havoc upstairs and I was on my own on the screen. It felt strange. But I couldn’t leave because then it would have been an empty room and that would be just too sad, whether the toilet door was open or not.

It was an uncynical hour. Maybe I’m imagining it but I could see parents de-stressing - or in some cases just drinking – in front of our eyes.

The hour draws to a close. There is a moment of poignancy as all the participants start leaving. All the zoom screens close. It’s as if the lights have come on and staff are collecting glasses in a very Have Yiz No Homes To Go To kind of way.

But the best thing about the end of a Family Zoom Dancy party? We’re already home.