A fry of fornication at the door

There was finally something fun to do here last night – a big dinner party. As usual with these big parties there was a sense of there being “a fry of fornication at the door” (as Shakespeare puts it) and also as usual it ended with me having a fight with myself. After dinner a rather feisty deep throated English girl sat down next to me and within five minutes made it clear that if I was up for it she was up for it too and there didn’t have to be consequences because she was only here for the weekend. When one’s young it’s as easy to accept those kind of invitations as it is to light a cigarette. Nowadays I’ve got this kind of chaste grandpa persona in me that at the first sign of mischief clears his throat and bursts into sermon. But the young ravenous urchin is still there too, and they always end up having a fight. When as a male you say no to sex on a platter you always end up feeling like you’ve just said no to life itself. You’re left with such a barren sterile sense of yourself somehow. You feel like yesterday’s washing up, smeared with desiccated fats and sauces. Nevertheless I very politely made excuses and feeling like some 18^th century rector went home alone. That was when the ravenous urchin and principled grandpa began wrestling on the kitchen table.

     I’m beginning to worry about the male in me. I recently behaved badly with a girl I met on Facebook. We had never met in the flesh but began writing messages to each other. Writing is often how I get drunk. It’s so easy for me to get carried away and blot out completely the actual person to whom I’m writing. My emails to her were like ladders up to her bedroom window which I would scale, half pirate, half clown, and shout my head off. In fact I did such an extravagant job of misrepresenting myself to her that I ended up feeling about six inches tall – as if I could take a bath in a garden puddle and afterwards wrap myself up in a leaf as a bathrobe. I suspect the secret scope behind all my behaviour with females these days is to avoid having sex ever again but without having to admit this might be the aim. Sex, like illness, is where we are stripped naked by nature and forced to play her game.  Sex is nature’s heart of darkness. And the haunted house where all our ghosts are awakened.