We’re ten years old, me and my best pal Ali, sitting face to face on an industrial stone wall and playing cards, as the train from Perth to Dundee thrillingly thunders by two feet away from our faces. We’re four metres above ground between the walkway and the track of Perth’s Tay Viaduct railway line, hair blowing backwards on we blissfully naïve children. A fully grown man approaches one day, a man we’ll soon decide has ‘a funny jaw.’ He asks if we’d like to go with him to the nearby Norie-Miller Walk, a scenic riverside stroll, ‘to pick daffodils.’ We look at each other, stifling giggles, ignore him and get back to our cards. He wanders away. Our parents have no idea where we are. We’re simply ‘out’, together, and that’s good enough for them.

Perth, 1975 and we were never in. Out was where the larks were, all the mirth and the malarkey, forever on bikes, or space-hoppers, or cavorting around the two local parks where rounders was played, swings were fallen off and boys would one day be kissed. The nearest we came to ‘staying in’ would be a rainy night inside my dad’s garage-sized shed, a scrap merchant’s junkyard packed with blade-heavy tools and overhead hanging hoses, where we’d black out the windows with blankets and play Blind Hide ’n’ Seek. We called this game, to make it even funnier, Man In The Dark.

And we danced, constantly. Scotland is a dancing kind of country and growing up there in the 70s you learned the ancient customs. From aged ten to 13, every Monday night we’d dutifully arrive in Perth’s Lesser City Hall to flail outstretched limbs to The Highland Fling, in embroidered white blouses, kilts a-swing, like girly saps on a tartan tin of all-butter Crawford’s shortbread.

But it was pop culture which formed us, the angular-limbed rules of the tartan traditions the opposite of modern dancing’s instinctive freedom, two early teenagers fortunate enough to be this exact age, at this exact time, when Abba and the Bee Gees were the biggest pop bands on Earth; obsessive devotees who saw both Abba: The Movie and Saturday Night Fever at ‘the pictures’, twice.

But we spent so much time together for other, more psychologically profound reasons: because our family lives were complicated, in different ways. We were, for each other, both vital escape and shelter from incoming storms.