Rachel Moore

The sight of the levelling up secretary getting down on it on a nightclub dance floor in his work shirt and suit trousers brought some February joy.

Michael Gove wouldn’t be top of my list of kindred spirits but watching a grainy video of him shaking his stuff made my heart leap.

Go, Michael, go. Dance like no one’s watching – and rest assured that when you hit the dance floor in your late 50s absolutely no one, apart from the media if you’re a politician – is watching, gives a jot or judges. That’s a great pleasure of getting older.

The best fun to be had now is at 60th birthday parties. 

Fun with a capital F.

Dance floors are always full of people giving it their all, rewinding to the tunes of the seventies and 80s, and throwing shapes they only dreamed of trying back the day, even when with the aid of several snakebites or Malibu and Cokes. 

Back then looking cool was all that mattered.

Hit your late 50s and looking cool is the last thing anyone thinks about. It’s all about the fun, memories and throwing off all that self-consciousness of years ago. 

Today, 60th birthday parties with a dancefloor, band or DJ, are where it’s at. And those dancefloors are never empty. They’re crowded from start to finish for hours of high-octane moves by over 50s making up for lost time.

I can’t wait until the next one and am already planning the playlist for mine.

The only rules are there are no rules.

Gove, 55, was out dancing in Aberdeen until 2.30am, strutting his stuff to Donna Summer's hit I Feel Love at the very 80s named Club Tropicana. I want to go there.

But night clubs where I might bump into my sons’ friend would be the last place I’d want to dance. That’s why 60th birthday parties are the way to go.

Bashes to celebrate 21st, 30th, 40th, 50th birthdays haven’t been a patch on the riotous 60th I’ve been to recently. Making up for all those years of self-conscious bashfulness about a lack of rhythm, or not fitting in.

At 60th parties no one cares. It all in and carry on until the music stops and the lights are switched on, everyone moans and asks when the next party is.

A dear old friend turns 60 at the end of this year and we’re already in practice Dance floor mates since we were 16 and Saturday girls at Boots, now, our families grown, she had moved back from Essex and we’re back where we left off.

In the last year we’ve danced until we dropped to Martin Kemp, Back to the 80s at Epic Studios and George Michael tributes

We’re doing what we love again. Now we have the freedom, the energy and the disposable income to go out and make the most of it.

What we need is something like London’s 40 Something Disco that has a a strict door policy of 40-year-olds or over only. No ID, no entry, only for the over 50s. A full dance floor is guaranteed.

A sure-fire business idea for an entrepreneur who wants to make a buck from making young oldies happy.

Robots are sign of laziness

A real irritant with progress and technology is how lazy we become.

Blindly following Satnavs takes drivers to dead ends and rolling down high gradient hills and a total incapability to read a map and know where they are.

A friend used an old map book the other day to get us to where we needed to be by more direct simple route than others following their sat nav.

In a few years, artificial intelligence will be living our lives for us. 

Experts this week said chorebots will cut time wasted on housework by 40% within a decade.

A group of 65 UK and Japanese artificial intelligence experts reckon that by 2033, AI will save us  46 per cent of the time we spend washing dishes, cooking and cleaning will be saved, with estimates of 43 per cent for laundry, 40 per cent for gardening and 31 per cent for pet care.

Amazon is said to be working on fridges that can detect when you are running low on an item and automatically add it to a shopping order.

Even some childcare can be automated. The mind boggles.

A friend in Cambridge was excited when robots delivering shopping from the Co-op in a pilot scheme between Starship Technology, the Co-op and Cambridgeshire County Council hit the streets to save car journeys, CO2 emissions and time.

Householders are alerted when they arrive and unlock them using an app. Great for the housebound and busy, but a tool to make the idle even more idle.

Eat to the season to avoid shortages

If we ate seasonal local produce, we would be tucking into turnips not remotely bothered by the shortage of tomatoes, cucumber and peppers.

We’ve become spoiled and entitled to believe we should be able to have access to whatever fruit and veg wen want whenever we want it.

Environment secretary Therese Coffey says  shortages could last another four weeks because of weather issues in Spain and Morocco.

Another natural prod in the conscience that we should be doing better to make the most of what we have and cut airmiles importing simply because we can.