The year is something like 1951, when my father was 20 years old. The occasion is a family gathering perhaps at their house in Bristol to celebrate, what? His sister’s marriage? Or it may have been his father’s return from Germany, or even simply the summer. My father is dead now so I cannot ask him, I can only guess.

The sequence of images was transferred onto VHS tape sometime in the ‘80s and then digitised around the turn of the millenium. It moves smoothly with few stutters or abrupt pauses but its technical quality matches its age and the skills of the man who held the camera. In its time it was only ever secondary to the event, an approximation acting as an aide memoire but now that all those present are gone it has become an event in itself.

On a small screen it appears quite well-resolved but I remember it projected onto a white roll-down surface like a ship’s sail whose mast was a thin metal tripod in the middle of a darkened room. The surface of the film is scratched and pock-marked and there are water-marks as if it had been washed before its transfer into a different format. Most interesting are the large white circles that flash across the image in various places, often in pairs but with no recognisable pattern or purpose. They appear so briefly they can barely be seen by the ordinary eye but when the film is slowed they become quite clear. They leap from frame to frame, quivering, changing places with each other, haloed in a trembling corona as if the image behind is melting. Together with the flickering of the damaged celluloid they appear alive with the three-dimensionality of balls of white light.

In these images they hover amongst the watching people whose faces come and go in the dappled sunlight beneath the tall trees that I imagine stand at the end of the garden. Their gestures and expressions change as abruptly as the shadows that overtake them, caught in their brief response to the moments unfolding before them as my father dances with a comical loping gait dressed in his casual suit and tie. He is not alone, there are others dancing, but he seems more intent on acting out the folly of the thing, performing for his family pursued by the balls of light. A woman I do not recognise, wearing a dark dress with three bright buttons on her shoulder, stands in the foreground politely amused while behind her, my grandmother laughs at her son.

The white balls dance and jump, clutching at the hem of his jacket hovering over him and sometimes pressing him down but he dances on, confident that he is leading them and not vice versa. This was always his way - never show a moment’s doubt, be assured of your authority over events and they will respond accordingly. Round and round they go in the warm afternoon capering out of shot and back again, up and down, arms swinging, faces lit by foolish grins that are only just recognisable in the thin and murky film of the event. Grains of shadow tremble in the folds of the people’s clothes. Spots of water fall through the air and streaks of white light flash between them all in silence. There must have been music but none remains now only the echo of the rhythm of the dance and the tickering of the cine projector in my memory.

The dance is not long even though to those taking part it seems without end. My grandmother laughs, the camera wobbles, a blurred face merges into the afternoon shadows. My father dances as the balls of light pursue him but there comes a point when he and they overlap. They seem to merge, two leaking into each other like raindrops on a pane of glass, gaining size and weight, melting into the now stooping figure of my father. And this seems to be the high-point of the piece - the film itself becomes excited, the watching figures more animated and therefore more fragmented. My grandmother laughs more brightly and the man standing next to her who is her oldest son leans back with delighted surprise and claps his hands as his brother disappears into the light.