The point is, anybody can do anything – once the karma ripens. Me, plump and grey, I’ve taken up techno dancing at the age of 52.

My introduction to dancing was clasping sticky child’s hands with the boys in Celtic Progressives under the tin roof of a small bush hall in Australia. Then came TV and we all went American with global dance crazes – the twist, the frug, the hitch-hiker and the rest.

At boarding school we had compulsory lessons in ballroom dancing – the Parma waltz, the foxtrot, the cha cha – girls dancing with girls (no boys allowed). Tall girls only ever ended up learning the man’s steps. It was not about having fun, but cold, about behaving, meeting the right people, marrying. Well, some insects have dance rituals. Out in the world at last I learned it was all about heat, about sex. Dancing was an ego-orgasm – how good could I look in order to make you want to look at me some more. Baby.

In due course, however, sex became completely boring for me, and I no longer wanted to seduce anyone at all ever again. Ten years later I still feel this way, like I just don’t have a flirt left in me. I had stopped dancing of course. I don’t even listen to music when I write because it just doesn’t work for me. I love my work – eight years at Lama Yeshe’s biography has never been boring but it is socially isolating and physically crippling.

I hit the gym. They play pop radio and pretty soon I found I was sweating up miles to the techno beats. The more I worked at that beat the more I liked it. To me techno music is not about sex, the rhythm is “ex-machina,” beyond flesh. Rock and roll is about 75 beats per minute – techno is double that and more.

I had to drive some long distances and I played techno straight for eight hours full blast. Finally I went to a major music blast in Melbourne and found I was in love with techno dancing – winding around and around and going going going for it. The more I danced the better it felt. Blissful.

Dance clubs start around midnight in my city and go until dawn, so I go to bed early and get up around 3:30 am, have a refreshing cup of tea then off to the club for the last few hours. I’ve never been asked to pay probably because of the late hour, and maybe my very grey hair and visible age. I wear black like everyone else, but I’m thirty years older than them. The other good thing is you can wear trainers on your feet.

I dance until I get into that column of wild flowing energy in which people never even knock each other, subtly in control of their space. Kids come up saying things like, “Gee, I hope I’m doing this at your age!” and I think, well, where are the other people my age? We were a raging generation, from Woodstock to Bob Marley; there was dancing in the streets. C’mon out from in front of that TV now!

They call techno dancers “Doofers” here, because the base beat goes “doof doof doof doof.” Goths are the best dancers – they are just brilliant and much more fun than the ballet. The secret is that the scarier they look, the sweeter they are.

I am aware that most dancers take the drug Ecstasy to keep them going all night but I do all mine on that cup of tea. It’s healthy, cheap, defies the natural order of the day, is a meditation in equipoise, a confrontation with age and death, and everyone you know will be so deliciously aghast! I can’t tell you when I last had so much fun.