What's all this stuff about dancing being an art form in itself and expression through music etc?

Where I came from $?~# years ago, the local dance constituted 100% of the local social life for us teens and twenties.

It was fairly clear to me that the purpose of dancing was very simply to enable we guys to "pull" a suitable girl in order to try to get her to do rude things in the back seat of your Morris Minor.

Likewise, the girls purpose in going to the dance was to prevent that happening. They found that the most effective way to do this was by refusing to dance.

Naturally, all of us guys had to make sure we were suitably pissed (that's the drunk kind of pissed) before getting to the dance - but as we well knew, this made us even more attractive - so how could the girls resist?

The whole thing degenerated into farce because we ended up playing "KBs". The winner of any evening was he who got Knocked Back more than anybody else.

This was naturally celebrated with more drink and much boasting of the "what I could have done with her" type before we all went home dejected and threw up over the doorstep.

Now in later years - I'm with you Jon Freeman - several pints of Guinness at the barn dance and I'm anybody's.