How to go clubbing without leaving your living room

To my surprise, what I miss most about life before the lockdown are parties. As others pine for restaurants and theatres, I am longing for sticky floors and 4 a.m. Ubers. Give me plastic cups and music so loud you feel it in your kidneys. Sylvia Plath wrote disparagingly of the ‘shrill tinsel gaiety of parties with no purpose’. It’s precisely that shrillness and pointlessness that I’m yearning for: drunk young bodies cramming together for no reason other than to be close to one another. At the weekend, my longing finally spilled over and I decided to make do online. I put on a nice top and loaded my lashes with mascara. I’m spending the pandemic at my parents’ house in the suburbs, and while they watched Foyle’s War in the sitting room, I stood next door with my laptop and third glass of champagne, cruising the internet for raves. I dropped by a party on Zoom that had been put on to raise money for the NHS. There was a DJ playing 1990s hits and about 30 strangers in little squares on my screen, dancing away in their living rooms. I turned out the lights and began to cut some shapes too, imagining I was in a club and that someone had spilled vodka orange down my top.

After a while I felt a euphoric sense of goodwill to all these strangers dancing together alone. One of the aspects of city life that I’ve been missing since the virus spread is the routine presence of strangers. Now I rarely see anyone I don’t know well. But these virtual dance events thrust you into countless bedrooms and kitchens, filled with people you will never see again. On Zoom you can get a good look at your fellow attendees, and I paused my dancing to snoop.