SHALL we dance? On a bright cloud of music, shall we glide?

The answer, it seems, is no, at least not if you're over 30. And if you can quote Deborah Kerr, and you quite fancy Yul Brynner, it's odds on that you're comfortably past that particular sell-by date.

I was tucking into sardines and salad on the hotel terrace while on holiday last week, when I started to notice distant dance music floating on the warm night air.

I looked along the beachfront, and there they were, the dancers, spilling out of the hotel where a local disco was under way. Laughing. Larking around. Enjoying themselves. And my God, were they young.

That's when it hit me that it's ages since I had a decent boogie. Why is this? Have those of us in middle youth become the victims of a watered-down version of Logan's Run, that (Seventies) film in which men and women are quietly eliminated at the age of 30?

Should we be grateful that we are spared compulsory euthanasia, and instead must simply adjust to a life without dancing when we get out of our twenties?

George Bernard Shaw said dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire. Maybe that's why when we reach a certain age, we're supposed to confine such extravagances to birthdays, weddings and Christmas.

That could be true, actually. I remember watching amazed as my parents started dancing at my cousin's wedding.

It was all too much for an innocent 11-year-old bridesmaid like me. Dad was chucking Mum over his shoulder, whirling her around, reliving his Teddy Boy days to Rock Around the Clock. They were having a great time, but I was scandalised. They must both have been 32 if they were a day.

Nowadays, 32 seems a bit wet behind the ears to me, but from memory it is about the age that you start to feel like the oldest swinger in town when you step inside a nightclub.

You begin to get fed up about queuing in the ladies' toilets, and you don't feel like sharing a cubicle with seven of your mates any more.

You can't be bothered to jostle for a shard of mirror space in which to reapply your lippy, and even if you decide to fight your way through to the chalk-face you find the lighting is so dim that you end up glossing your chin. But you don't complain, because if they turned the lights up the pert young thing next to you might faint at the sight of your ravaged features.

At the bar, you're invisible, and if you ever get served a drink you find the music's so loud you can't hear yourself think, let alone have a decent conversation.

Poor old soul. You've forgotten, of course, that talking is not the point.

So what is left for those of us cast into the outer darkness of the dancing world? There's always tea dances, I suppose, but they're not much good if you still work during the day, and speaking personally, I don't know any of the moves.

There's always Salsa lessons, but when you've never been taught how to do anything more than shift your weight from one leg to another, it's all a bit complex - and the teachers are dauntingly lithe.

Maybe we should form some sort of support group for deprived ex-dancers. We could get together, talk about Saturday Night Fever, maybe sit in a line and do that Oops Upside Your Head routine, just for old time's sake.

You don't think that's why we've been banned, do you?

Updated: 10:25 Wednesday, October 05, 2005