Róisín Ingle on . . . searching for the slow set

There are no slow sets in Wesley anymore. I discover this while gently quizzing a 14-year-old of my acquaintance. She went to Wez for the first time recently. Wesley is called Wez now, is another thing I find out. Within the first 60 seconds of our conversation she rolls her eyes seven times. I feel about 99.

She makes it very clear she doesn’t want to talk about slow sets (whatever they are, old-timer) or about how short people’s skirts were or about whether anybody was drinking or about how many Taylor Swift songs were played, which is fine because I need a moment to absorb this new revelation.

There are no slow sets? None? No slow songs at the end of the disco where you stand by the sweat-damp wall wondering if you’ll get asked up and then if you do it’s by the wrong boy with the wrong kind of breath and you can’t figure out whether your arms are supposed to go around his neck or his waist but then you remember it’s his neck so he can put his arms around your waist and try to feel your bum, and then you have to decide whether you like it or not, and if you don’t like it and you move his hand away will everyone think you are uncool? Good, I think. It’s good there are no slow sets anymore. Slow sets were traumatic.

And yet. No more slow sets? She rolls her eyes again. Tells me I need to get over it. She says she doesn't know why slow sets were the first thing all the adults in her life wanted to know about when she got back from Wez. If she was familiar with the word "prurient", I think she'd use it at this point. Instead, she calls me nosy. I am highly offended. I am not being nosy. I prefer curious. This is anthropological research for an important document I'm researching called How The Young Live Now.

“This is my society not yours,” she says. “You don’t need to know how we live now. I mean it, you are just being nosy.”

Her society. I feel about 105. But anyway. No slow sets? No standing by the wall as the object of your affections walks slowly towards you, his hair flopping over his right eye in that way that makes your stomach swirl, and then he's in front of you, asking you up, and you are saying "yeah, okay" as though you don't care one way or the other and it's Madonna's Crazy For You, your absolute fave, and you can feel the eyes of all your friends on you and you can't remember whether his arms go around your waist or around your neck until suddenly they are on your bum and you are mortified and thrilled at the same time.

Terrible, I think. It’s terrible there are no slow sets. Why did somebody kill them? Are they dead at all the discos or just at discos on the southside of Dublin? Do they even call them discos? No point asking the 14-year- old of my acquaintance. She has completely clammed up.

I go into work. There are no 14-year-olds around but a colleague in her early 20s looks baffled when I ask her when slow sets were killed off. She wants to know what slow sets are. A fortysomething colleague tells me slow sets died years ago, even in country discos. Somebody else says they have been replaced by twerking. Which leads somebody else to reminisce about the dodgy DJ in his local disco that used to call slow sets something else. My 14-year-old acquaintance might be reading this, so I won’t say what. (There is no way she is reading this. If she was, her eyes would have rolled out of her head by now anyway).

I ask Twitter. I don't get a definitive answer. Somebody suggests there are still slow sets at over-40s events. Someone else says Club Nassau calls itself the Home of the Slow Set, which is a clever marketing ploy, especially if they really have died out everywhere else. Patrick Barrett sends me a link to a YouTube clip of Fat Larry's Band playing their slow-set classic Zoom and his own reminiscence on this rite of passage: "Crossing the floor, heart in mouth awaiting rejection, spare Juicy Fruit ready."

I am also informed the way the young folk get together these days is by asking each other to sit down, which sounds kind of Victorian. “Did you go seats with him?” is how they phrase it, apparently, but I can’t be sure. I’d call the 14-year-old to verify it but something tells me she won’t answer.

roisin@irishtimes.com