This is not a new obsession

Absolutely not. The powerful recurring dream, the one in which K and I, naked, make love on a sanded wood floor, with the odd cushion covered in a fabric based on a De Morgan design, while a cellist, perhaps Casals, plays the sarabande from the fifth of Bach's cello suites, the one in C minor, is of no significance whatsoever.

Who is K you ask? I cannot tell you.

Half a pound of tuppeny rice

I wasn't going to write here again, but if I can't break my own rule, whose rules can I break?

I went to another job interview the other day. I knew as soon as I entered the room that it was not going to be a success. Two of the panel of three looked at me with hostility the instant our gazes met. I stayed in there for an hour or so. My presentation, which had seemed so convincing when I rehearsed it, was dull and incoherent when delivered. As for the questions, the panel chair devoted her time to telling me that I didn't understand the job I'd applied for, while her companion asked me banal questions and scowled at my answers. The third member of the panel was civil, and pretended that she was interested in my responses. I would have heard yesterday if they were going to offer me the job. I have not.

To revive my spirits at the end of this depressing experience, I went for an espresso and planned the rest of the day. I decided to have lunch at a Lebanese restaurant in Soho which had received good reports. So thither I went, sat at a window table and enjoyed delicious meze with a glass of a Lebanese Petit Noir, served by a very beautiful waitress. It was all thoroughly agreeable and I shall not reveal its name, because I want to keep it for myself.

The restaurant is in a Soho alley and inevitably there is, more or less opposite, a sex shop. These places have always been risible. What quantities do they sell their commodity in? Units of time, or of weight or length? 'I'd like half a pound of sex, please'. In this case it was even more comical for the shop bore the name, 'the British sex shop'.

What on earth can this mean? Is it a shop for xenophobes, who only want British sex, none of that foreign filth, thank you very much? Or is it selling British sex to the world? This seems unlikely too. I can think of few things less marketable than British sex. It brings to mind bed-socks, red flannel vests and Ovaltine, or the innuendo-laden humour of McGill and the Carry On films, as truly erotic as suet pudding . When the act is over, rather than whisper endearments in throaty tones of passion, the British woman will ask the British man if he's, 'feeling better now, dear'.

The British heroes I was told about by grown-ups when I was a small swain certainly would have nothing to do with sex. Drake, for example, only cared for his bowls. Nelson is problematic here, with all that carrying-on with Emma Hamilton, but that was not a part of the Nelson story relayed to me at prep school.

Baden-Powell summed this up in his exhortations to boys, if experiencing urges. to 'wash your parts in cold water and cool them down'. He disapproved of hanging around on street corners, smoking and talking smut. God knows what he would have made of the Internet.

Does this have something to do with the important part foreign women have played in my life? L was half-American, and there have been some others from the other side of the Atlantic in my life. There have been formative encounters too with German and French women; indeed I met recently a German woman whose delicate beauty, intelligence and enigmatic persona I find bewitching. Perhaps I should emigrate?

The shop name could be a joke. Sigmund Freud used to argue that jokes express sexual impulses. But then, as Ken Dodd said, Freud never had to play the second house at the old Glasgow Empire on a night when Rangers and Celtic had both lost.

Sexually, I'm More of a Switzerland

I come back here to sign the praises of a new book, Sexually, I'm More of a Switzerland. In my time with, or rather without, L, the first volume of personals from the London Review of Books, They Call Me Naughty Lola, was a great solace. Now there's a new collection.

Codetta

There have been kind comments, and I'm grateful for them. But this blog is now purposeless. I could write a thousand more things about L, about ageing, about the Burra Mem and the Swainlets, about the world's sadness, about the Mills and Boon centenary...actually that last one is not such a bad idea. M&B fans divide themselves strictly according to genre. The doctor-nurse romance, some argue, is its highest form. I could offer you something in this genre in which Nurse L finds herself unable to resist Dr Swain, but that would be unrealistic. Instead, a brief extract from Love among the bedpans:

Clytemnestra blushed as she recalled the ward round. How could she have been so gauche, so silly? If Mr Pus, the kindly old genito-urinary consultant, had been in charge, her slip with the clyster would not have troubled her. Even Matron Chancre must have made mistakes when she was young. But Mr Pus had not taken the ward round. He had left it to his registrar, Dr Edge, whose steady gaze unsettled her as she mopped up the unfortunate patient's fluids.

She went to the sluice-room and began to scrub. 'Clytemnestra', said a voice as deep and resonant as a 32ft stop on a mighty organ. She turned to see Dr Edge, his blue eyes fixed on her. "Dr Edge', she murmured, so low she could not be sure if he could hear her. "Call me Cliff,' he replied, his voice thick with emotion....continued page 64

Wedding

It's dull and conventional to end a story with a wedding, but I must, for L tells me she is to marry someone, not me, of course.
I shall not write here anymore. I will leave it for the entertainment of the young and as an awful warning to other middle-aged men.

Finis.

Post 14th February post

I don't have the stomach for this. I can't summon the energy even for the necessary denunciations of yesterday's VD nonsense.

One part of the myth though seems to me worth attention, the belief, perhaps Chaucerian, that on 14 February birds choose their mates. Yesterday I saw seagulls eyeing each lasciviously and squawking invitations to rough seagull-sex. This means little seagulls in the months to come, and the associated nest debris blocking chimneys, aggressive behaviour towards passing humans, vandalising rubbish sacks left in the street and, above all, a lot more shit.

Party going

At a party, L and I sit at some distance from one another. I buy her a drink; we pass commonplace remarks to one another across others' heads, yet still each platitude seems to me to have extraordinary significance. Someone else is there, who, saying goodbye, kisses me fondly. In my arms this woman seems light, as if her skeleton were as hollow as a bird's, and as delicately warm as a pastry resting from the baker's oven. Few others ever felt like this, only L in that short embrace at a railway station, the hug that started all this so long time ago, and a few others. I wonder if L noticed?