‘TIS THE NIGHT after Christmas, when all through the house not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse.

Forgive me: I’m lying about the mouse. More yet, the mouse is lying about itself: the mouse is stirring. If it were not stirring, this would not be getting written. The mouse is scuttling around beside my word-processor, with a human forefinger on its back, as the result of which our little team is able to pose the question: whatever happened to that mouse with the human ear on its back? Genetically interfered with a few years ago, how is it passing its time at this very moment? Is it in another house, with its huge ear cocked, striving to hear if anything is stirring? These are big questions. But they are not nearly as big as the question my mouse and I shall be attempting to address during the course of what follows — or, rather, what might follow: my mouse and I are midnight ramblers, we are never entirely certain where we go from here. I know where I have been from here, mind: I have been up to the Forbidden Room. It is on the floor above my study, and Mrs Coren has banned me from going there. That is why I can tiptoe up to it only when not a creature is stirring.

The room has all my old suits hanging in it. They are hanging over all my old shoes. These many years past, Mrs Coren has been banging on at me to take them to Oxfam, but I have not taken them, not just because I wish to spare the tribesmen of sub-Saharan Africa the derision attendant on hobbling around in patent leather pumps and crêpe-soled brothel-creepers and 1970s outfits of electric blue and chalk-stripe brown, with wide lapels and flared trousers, but because of those many years past, which Mrs Coren believes it does me no good at all to dwell upon. For what the Forbidden Room really contains is both memory and the hope that the past might, some time in the future, once more become the present. Marcel Proust had a room like this, only with biscuits hanging in it.

And I went up there a minute ago because I rather think this might, at last, have happened; and if I am about to be called upon to squeeze myself into those old suits again and horn myself into those old shoes, then I shall have Bruce Forsyth to thank. Or curse. For far below me, on the mantelpiece of the living room and reflecting the winking reds and green of the tree, stands an invitation to a Strictly Ballroom Retro New Year’s Eve Party.

It was bound to happen. Successful television does that, and I suppose I should count myself fortunate that we weren’t asked to a Get Me Out Of Here Party where, as Big Ben bongs, guests toast the new year in glasses of wolf-widdle and grasp one another’s throats for Auld Lang Syne; yet I remain, even about this one, more than a mite apprehensive. For, though I have, up in the Forbidden Room, the retro gear, do I still have the retro talent? It is a big question, because I have been talking about my dancing for a long time. Worse yet, I have written about it. I have told the story of how I was taught to dance by Sergeant Ronger, of the Parachute Regiment, who took the woman’s part so manfully that my dangling feet never betrayed me by touching the floor, and who swept me, at strict tempo, past the withering squint of an examiner from the Federation of Ballroom Dancing to win me a bronze medal.

It isn’t as swish a medal as the one my partner picked up at Arnhem, it doesn’t entitle me on Armistice Day to foxtrot past the Cenotaph, but it says I can do what it says on the tin. And so I could, in 1956.

But my mettle — tin, bronze, whatever — hasn’t been tested since. Soon after I was decorated, and before I was old enough to try my battle honours out on partners who didn’t have to shave twice a day, dancing changed. Instead of gliding across the floor in symbiotic pairs, dancers now stood around writhing in the disconnected solipsism for which, sadly, medals have yet to be struck. It was stuff I could not strut.

But half a century on, thanks to Strictly Come Dancing, my stuff is back in vogue. Can I still do it? Will I remember whisk, wing and telemark as anything more than monitory arcana hissed into my ear through Sergeant Ronger’s bristled lips as reminders to my effing feet? I have only a few days to find out. It is time to click my latest partner on to the net, get it to download a track or two of Victor Sylvester, and see if I can do a turn around the room without knocking over the furniture, in desperate hope of a happy new year.