All hail...the kitchen disco!

“You’re not going to do what you did last Friday are you?” asked my 11-year-old son on the eve of yet another groundhog weekend whose greatest adventure might prove to be a mammogram for all it required driving more than six miles from home to a never-visited-before location.

“What’s that?” I asked back.

“Play music and drink too much wine,” he said, disappearing. (They do that, children, don’t they...reprimand on the move).

Aah, the kitchen disco. It’s always been a favourite of mine. After all, there’s a lot to love. What other social event welcomes slippers on the dance floor, offers a pre-paid bar, guarantees exclusivity, boasts a hand-picked playlist, and occurs within tripping distance of one’s own bed. Even pre-2020 this ultimately organic little happening was a highlight of any social calendar chez moi: an always happy, eminently simple segue from dining-table to dance-floor, kids’ party to nightclub, or an any-night-of-the-week spontaneous celebration requiring no greater resource than a Spotify soundtrack and the remains of whichever bottle happened to have been opened over dinner. All under your own roof! Now, in an age of silenced gigs, cancelled festivals, and banned house parties the humble kitchen disco has come to reign supreme. And thank god for it. There’s just one snag - lockdown’s door policy grants under-age access...and pre-teens have never been the most ardent supporters of their parents’ frivolities.

In a year that’s seen COVID attributed deaths top 100,000, left as many families bereaved and mourning in the cruellest of circumstances, and brutally exacerbated pre-existing socio-economic inequalities is it trite to observe that between lockdowns, tier systems and shielding...parents have barely had an evening away from their kids?

Never before have mothers, fathers and young children lived so much in each other’s pockets and relied so much on each other for recreation. Friends, separated from their co-parents, who even before COVID spoke of the welcome every-other-weekend break an amicable arrangement afforded have acknowledged how especially grateful they’ve been for the set-up in lockdown - for them and their kids.

Yes, the space between us has become noticeably reduced! I’m an at-home parent and my son’s an only child. Outside the five and a half hours of online learning he does a day there is little to dilute the dynamic between us before daddy returns from work in the evening. When he was physically going to school my son would scuff through the door at the end of the day with colour in his cheeks, enlivened by a commute shared with friends, and faintly sugar-scented thanks to a group tuckshop stop on route home. He’d volunteer anecdotes from the day, marvelling anew at their memory - what this one had done in PE, what that one had said on the train. These moments matter. The jostling with peers, the banter, the bits in between. It’s how children learn about the world and themselves. Now the school day begins and ends with the click of a mouse and down time features park walks, board games, and pillow fights with mum. It doesn’t come close. Plus, I am a woefully inept gaming opponent, making any character I play run in circles, bang into walls and shoot wildly off target….a suspiciously familiar metaphor for what’s going on IRL. Thank God for cross-platform playing.

Any one day taken in isolation is mostly OK: there’s structure - of a kind - there’s food, there’s fresh air, there’s love. Incrementally...it’s really not. Though it remains to be seen exactly how that will pan out ahead. For all children. Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner, warns of an epidemic of mental health issues among young people as a result of repeated, extended school closures and isolation. I hope the government’s catch-up scheme will take into account the detriment to mental and emotional wellbeing as much as it does to any fall short in the curriculum. After all, what real learning can be achieved by children who are anxious, depressed or just bewildered.

Meanwhile, we make do. Outside the ‘classroom’, park time with friends, zoom calls with family, and gaming with classmates help give our boy a break from mum and dad and at least a flavour of independence. But he has to cut us some slack too...

To be clear, kitchen discos aren’t necessarily a weekly happening in our house, or even a monthly one. We don’t subject him to banging mini-raves every weekend (or any weekend) and the Friday in question passed by no more eventfully than with tea and Netflix. But - especially in a world stalled,..we reserve the right to cut loose and take the lid off once in a while.

Incidentally, my partner, often the instigator of kitchen discos, will equally often throw in the towel early leaving me to pirouette round the place alone and creating by default that ultimately exclusive event: the one-woman kitchen disco.

I’ll fly the flag for as long as I have to - but I can’t wait till I can rope in some friends.