Which is what I do most of the time, now.

The Caller is the prime mover of the Barn Dance or Ceili. As long as the Band can keep a reasonable pace and beat (with the amount of noise a roomful of dancers makes, playing in tune is virtually irrelevant), it is the Caller's job to make the night a success - to entertain and to let his audience entertain themselves.

The dance programme comprises circle dances, square dances, and those made up of lines. Geometry, eh? I knew it would come in useful one day. The trick for the Caller is to conjure up variety out of these patterns, so that while every dance is different,  the night's dancing develops along the way so that those who start out complete beginners can, by the end of the evening, handle some of the more complicated movements with the same expertise as those who have been dancing for years.

You can tell the latter by their look of complete exhaustion. It is, after all, sensible to walk sometimes.

Or catch a bus.

Anyway, that's what us Callers do. I generally kick off with a circle dance, because you don't have to bother about how many couples you can get on the dance floor - just sling them on and make 'em dance. Progressive, usually, which means that as the dance goes on each person dances with several partners - that way, by the end of the first dance, most people there have trodden on each other's feet and the atmosphere has become a little less formal...

Then maybe an easy straight set dance, with the partners facing each other, and staying with each other for the whole dance, which is nice. Isn't it? Of course it is.

After that, it could be a square dance or Sicilian circle and then everyone has done most of the basic moves and you can lurch wholeheartedly into something more complicated like a Strip the Willow or Chains, or anything that takes one's fancy, really.

The world, after all, is your whelk.

Or any other mollusc of your choice.

I call for a variety of bands around the Cheshire area these days, notably a Chester based band called Three Point Turn and several bands around where I now live - bands such as Flotsam, Madcap or Trebuchet.

 And, of course, for anyone who gives me money, for, sadly, it is the nature of the world to demand recompense for all things, and the person at the check-out counter in the supermarket is no exception.

But it is possible to have fun, too...