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‘But there’s so much going on,’ I pointed out. ‘There are, like, two hundred countries in the world, and nearly seven billion people. Don’t you want to maybe, experience a bit of it?’

He scowled at me, and half laughed, but not in a mean way. ‘You don’t get it, do you? The thing is, I really couldn’t give a fuck about all that. I’m happy where I am, with what I’ve got. I couldn’t give a monkey’s about the rest of the world, if I’m honest.’ His face had softened. He was genuinely trying to explain himself. I felt quite touched and privileged in a distinctly patronising way.

I held my hands up in resignation. ‘That’s fine. I’m happy you’re happy. I just can’t help thinking, you know…’

‘Yeah, you always thought too much,’ he interrupted. ‘That was your problem, mate.’

‘What does that even mean? And what the fuck else was I supposed to do?’ I realised I’d kind of snapped this. And I swore. And I don’t often swear. Not out loud. ‘There was nothing else for me to do. I was hardly the most popular kid in school.’ I’d snapped that too. I smiled at him, deliberately. I could feel myself getting emotional. That really wasn’t supposed to happen. The grudge had gone. I tried to remember that. It was all in the past. Calm. Calm. ‘What do you want to drink, Bucky? Let me buy you a drink.’

A couple more drinks down the line and I found myself talking with Ange, Deb, and George. I was drunk, they were drunk, we all were drunk, and the conversation turned to physical appearance. Not mine, but it was only a matter of time.

George was lavishing praise upon Deb Hutton. And rightly so. Then she extended her praise to Ange, congratulating them both on managing to keep their figures.

I interrupted. ‘Oh, God, George. Don’t you know it’s seriously bad form to start talking about weight in the presence of someone who’s morbidly obese?’

They laughed.

‘You’re not morbidly obese,’ chirped George and Deb predictably.

‘You are definitely obese though,’ said Ange.

George gasped. ‘Don’t be mean!’ she cried.

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘As it happens, she’s right.’ Ange gave me a playful punch on the arm. I scrunched up my face at her adoringly, but I’m not really sure how it went across.

The conversation remained cosmetic. George was talking about her sunbed addiction. ‘It’s just about the only time I ever leave the house,’ she said, ‘apart from work. I even do it in the summer.’ Deb was the opposite. With her white, flammable body, she was obsessed by skin cancer and terrified of the sun.

‘I went to a tanning salon once,’ I said, ‘but I think I was allergic.’ They laughed. ‘It’s far from funny,’ I insisted. ‘I came out in a rash. But it’s good that it gets a laugh. It’s good that my suffering brings a little happiness into the world.’

‘Oh, poor you,’ said Ange.

I laughed. I love Ange. ‘No, but it’s a nightmare,’ I persisted. ‘It’s like there’s nothing I can do to even pretend that I’m healthy…’

‘You could lose weight,’ said Ange, flatly. Followed by the disapproval of George and Deb. George actually blushed on my behalf.

I smiled. ‘No, she’s absolutely right,’ I said. ‘Losing weight would be a good place to start.’

‘No, but I think it’s really good.’ This was George continuing to shy away from the truth. ‘You know, everyone is so vain these days, and I include myself in that, although you might not think so to look at me. I’m a complete slave to vanity and I hate it. I think it’s really good that you’re not…you know, that you haven’t give in to the pressures…’

‘What makes you think I haven’t given in to the pressures of vanity, George?’

She stopped talking, unsure of whether or not I was joking. She searched my expression. Her drunken eyes bobbed across my many-elbowed face, like wooden hoops down cobbled streets. ‘No, I just mean…’ She was lost.

I put her out of her misery. ‘I know what you mean,’ I chuckled. ‘And I know there’s a compliment in there somewhere desperately trying to fight its way through to the surface and I really appreciate it, honest I do. But you’re going to have to give me a blow job to make up for it.’

I was drunk. Part of me strived to feel embarrassed and apologetic for what I’d just said but it was getting laughs and it was only a joke, for God’s sake—kind of—and the new me was a little bit more loose-lipped than the old me. And I liked him for that.

Ange was patting George on the back, really quite firmly. George was choking, having laughed some of her wine up through the roof of her mouth into her nose. At one stage, she was bent double, a piece of grit in the very eye of a coughing fit. ‘Seriously though,’ I continued, ‘it was very difficult for me at school, being the only boy in the third, fourth, and fifth year that you never went down on.’

Eventually George recovered enough to say, between loud sniffs and mutterings of ‘Oh dear’, ‘Well, you never asked, did you? Everybody else asked.’

‘You’re in there, Stan,’ Ange declared bawdily. ‘She’s just a girl who can’t say no.’

To which George replied, ‘Hold your horses, Ange love, that was fifteen years ago.’

‘A leopard never changes its spots,’ Deb piped up.

‘So what, you’re the same prissy bitch you were when you were at school, are you?’ George retorted.

‘Now this is more like it.’ Ange laughed. ‘This is what I come to these things for!’

‘If you thought I was a prissy bitch then, then yeah, you probably still will now, but that might say more about you than it does about me,’ came Deb’s decidedly prissy reply.

‘Yeah, no change there,’ George snapped back, and they both laughed drunkenly, all talk of my oral pleasure washed away on this exultant wave of slightly bitter nostalgia.

Then Bucky appeared with a tray which was positively overwhelmed by drinks. ‘Here you go, peeps,’ he said. ‘Peeps!’ I repeated, grabbing hold of what I guessed was my fifth, but it could have been my eighth Guinness. ‘Cheers!’ I shouted. Suddenly everyone was standing around in a rough circle, maniacally clinking one another’s glasses.

‘Look in the eyes!’ cried Karen, as she clinked each in turn. ‘The eyes!’ cried Ange. Cries of ‘Eyes!’ reverberated round the pub, and people clinked and reclinked while drunkenly staring avidly into the windows of one another’s souls.

‘Here’s to the past!’ I cried, to still more clinks, and there it went—‘the past!’—bouncing clumsily but merrily round a ring of rubbery wet mouths.

When last orders were called, I found myself drinking vodka, which I knew to be a very stupid idea right then as I was pouring it into my fat neck. The conversation had turned to Christmas, the conversational curse of the season.

Bucky, Ange, Kaz, and George reminisced about some Christmas party where Graham Uren (whose surname made his life a misery) got so drunk that he believed he was possessed by the devil. Complete breakdown. Oh, the hilarity.

Well, I wasn’t at that party, because I wasn’t invited, but I do remember that Christmas. The Christmas of 1992. I remember the last day of term particularly well, because it was the day I was suspended from a goalpost on the school football field, wrists tied over the crossbar with a length of rope, me stretched on to my tiptoes, and my trousers pulled down around my ankles. It was the day thirty or so fellow pupils came to look and laugh and point and I had to wait for twenty-five minutes, in mute terror and fierce, boiling humiliation, before anyone had the decency to let me down.

‘It was funny though,’ Mac pointed out.

He’d been one of the five or six of my schoolmates responsible for tying me up.

‘No.’ I looked at him, really trying to stop my eyes from tearing up. ‘No, it really wasn’t funny,’ I repeated. ‘It totally fucked me up for a long time and it really wasn’t funny.’

Mac eventually became aware that there was a situation. He glanced back and forth at other faces, his grin fading.

‘Darren, have you ever been publicly humiliated, or bullied?’

He squirmed and nodded his head. ‘All right, mate, I’m sorry. It was a long time ago, you know what I mean…’

I was about to continue to argue with him, when Karen stepped forward and grabbed my arm, gestured for me to follow her and walked me away from the group towards the door and out on to the street, where she took hold of my wrists, looked up at my face and into my eyes and said, ‘Stan, I just wanted to say, I’m really, really sorry for the part I know I played in the torture that you had to put up with day in and day out for years in that…horrible fucking school. I’m honestly, genuinely so sorry.’

And that’s all it took. I burst into tears. My hands flew up to my face and I began to bawl. Karen tried to put her arms around me. I resisted at first, blocking her with my arms. Then I forced myself to stop weeping, and gradually lowered my guard. Karen’s face was wet too. She smiled at me, put her arms around my neck and squeezed.

Off I went again.

I don’t believe I’d cried this hard since I was at school. Maybe not since recovering from the goalpost incident. I held on to her like I could have squeezed the life out of her if I wasn’t careful and I cried like a giant baby with a face that not even its mother could love. And if you think I’m ugly in the cold light of day, you should see me with a skinful of Guinness and vodka on a cold winter’s night with my mad face sobbing and snot dangling from my nose.

‘It’s all right,’ said Karen. ‘It’s OK. Everything’s OK now. Come on. Come on, let’s get your face dried up.’

Gradually my sobs subsided. Karen gave me tissues. ‘I’m really glad you came tonight. For selfish reasons, I mean. It’s really made me confront some things that I’d been pushing to the back of my mind, you know?’

I blew my nose. ‘This is not Oprah,’ I said, and Karen laughed. She looked at me, all smiles. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘You turned out really fucking well.’ And that was that. I was off again.

Back in the pub a little while later, there were more drinks from somewhere, loud music and erratic loose-limbed dancing. Then time was called. It was over. We were being moved on.

‘But I was just getting going,’ I told the barman.

‘Just get going,’ the barman replied, wittily.

‘We’re going clubbing, mate, come on!’

‘Mac!’ I yelled.

‘We’re going to Air & Breathe!’

‘Breathe!’ I yelled. ‘Breathe!’

Then I remember choking, trying to breathe, trying desperately to catch my breath, fighting the feeling that I was drowning. Then I remember movement, falling and tumbling. Then I remember waking up, parched and gasping, my throat like a rusty cheese-grater. Then waking again with my legs and arms held hostage by a giant, sweet-smelling duvet. Light filtering through half-closed curtains. I had absolutely no idea where I was. I was alone. I was naked. I felt horrendous and frightened and lost. I closed my eyes and crawled away from the pain of consciousness, back into the sanctuary of sleep.

I was woken again at 10.15 a.m. By Ange. She knocked and popped her head round the bedroom door. ‘Wakey wakey,’ she chimed. I groaned, believing this to be the appropriate response at moments such as this. I pulled the duvet instinctively over my face, which was somehow covered in bits. ‘Where am I?’ I whimpered.

‘You’re at Ange’s house in Hackney,’ Ange replied. I was in Ange’s spare room. I breathed it in. ‘You had a bit too much to drink last night and got sick on George, so we brought you home in a cab. Karen’s here too and we’re all about to eat breakfast together and have a good old laugh about last night.’

Minutes later I shuffled through the living room and into the kitchen. My clothes were still drying so I was squeezed into Ange’s dressing gown, which I was trying not to feel too closely or smell too keenly for fear of inappropriate arousal, and which just about covered my shameful amplitude but was in truth a tad too pink and flowery for my taste; much pinker, in fact, and a great deal more flowery than I was feeling. ‘Goooood morning!’ cried Karen, bright as a bag of buttons on Cardigan Day. ‘Don’t you look good enough to eat!’ She laughed, amused by herself.

Apparently, we never made it to the club. Outside the pub I had an attack of best frienditis and began hugging everyone and telling them that I had learned a lot and that I considered them all very dear friends, while someone tried to organise taxis. I ended up with Georgina, shambling, falling into her, my body slurring. Ange witnessed this and shouted, helpfully, ‘What about that blow job, George?’ At which point George laughed and licked her lips at me.

Apparently, my blacking out and my vomiting occurred simultaneously, so I was already on my way down to the ground when George’s legs got between my puke and the pub car park.

I cringed into my coffee. I felt ill all over again. My head began to spin and bruises I’d just been reminded of began to breathe and throb in my arms and legs.

Ange and Karen were still very amused by the whole episode. ‘There was loads of it,’ said Karen.

‘It ran down her tights and into her boots,’ added Ange.

‘Gallons of it,’ insisted Karen.

‘God,’ I moaned. ‘I was aiming for Mac.’

‘I find that difficult to believe,’ said Karen. ‘You’d just told him you loved him.’

Apparently—if any of this nonsense is to be believed—I’d also professed my love to both Ange and Karen while drifting in and out of consciousness in the cab home. Also, by all accounts, I even made a coarse proposition or two. But I was assured my advances were ‘hilarious’ rather than ‘ugly’. So that was something.

I felt bad. But I felt wonderful too. Suddenly it seemed that I was part of the gang, that I’d been accepted. And all it took was for me to get drunk and be sick on someone.

‘Poor George,’ I said. ‘That’s terrible.’

‘She was definitely going to blow you too,’ added Ange. Then suddenly my penis was the topic of conversation and both Ange and Karen were laughing and passing conspiratorial looks back and forth.

‘What?’ I said, worried.

They looked at me, mock-suggestively, and I felt the blood rising in my face.

‘You don’t remember anything about how you got from the cab, covered in your own vomit, into my bed, naked and clean, do you?’

My mouth fell open.

‘You’re hung like a horse, my lad,’ said Ange.

I was embarrassed, but in a good way. They explained that they’d dragged me upstairs, undressed me and sponged me down. ‘I swear you were awake,’ said Karen. ‘Go on, you can admit it now.’

I wasn’t awake. At least, not fully. I remembered climbing stairs and heat on my legs but I think I thought I was dreaming. A brilliant dream, befitting of a birthday.

I started laughing.

‘Part of him was certainly awake,’ said Ange. ‘Know what I mean?’ she added, in the voice of Marsha from Spaced.

I laughed for a while longer, slightly maniacally. Then I was wiping my eyes. ‘Do you know, that was the best birthday I’ve had for years.’

‘What?’

‘Probably ever, if I’m honest.’

‘Did you know it was his birthday?’

‘It was your fucking birthday?!’

Blimey. They suddenly seemed really annoyed. ‘How could you not say anything?’ they wanted to know.

I shrugged. ‘I dunno. It didn’t seem important.’

On the contrary, they explained, it was actually very important indeed. Then, in order to show me just exactly how important it was, they made immediate arrangements to take me out to lunch.

Lunch, in time, turned into drinks, drinks turned into cocktails and cocktails turned into a wonderful long day becoming firm friends with two women who in very different ways had made my schooldays a living hell.

We finished it all off with a meal in a Korean restaurant, one of those where they cook your meat in front of you, on grills built into the table. ‘I’m going to change my life,’ I said, as we tucked in. ‘I’m going to sort myself out. Lose weight and start, you know, putting myself out there. Yesterday was the first time I’ve been out to a pub, or out of the house in any social situation, in about six months.’

Ange and Karen were both shocked by this, and full of encouragement for my plans.

‘I’m thinking of starting a blog too,’ I said.

‘What’s a blog?’ said Karen.

‘Do it,’ said Ange, after berating Karen for her ignorance. ‘If you think it’ll help. I’ll be happy to cook you a healthy meal once in a while too,’ she added. ‘And I must say, I’m loving your PMA.’

‘I love your PMA,’ I corrected. ‘What’s my PMA?’

‘Positive Mental Attitude,’ she said. ‘I’m loving it.’

Ange stuck out her tongue and clamped it between her front teeth. It was something she did when she thought she’d said something funny.

‘Put your tongue away,’ I said, adoringly.

It was a wonderful day. They wouldn’t even let me pay. And when finally I returned home, I was a changed man, more than ready and one hundred per cent willing to face the challenges of a new year and, if it wasn’t a tad too pretentious, a new life.

I felt like dynamite. In fact, for the first time in thirty years, I no longer felt afraid.

Or at least, not cripplingly so.

CHAPTER FOUR LIKE A LEOPARD ON A DOVE

Crippled by withdrawal, I ache, itch, shiver and whine. I’m beginning to think that stopping both smoking and eating, at the same time, was asking maybe just a little too much of my central nervous system. I think I may—ironically enough—have bitten off more than I can chew. It’s almost 11 a.m. Ordinarily by this time, I would have polished off three bacon sandwiches, a bowl of Sugar Puffs and at least two cups of coffee. Plus biscuits. And right about now, looking forward to my third or fourth cigarette, I’d be heading to the kitchen for another pint of coffee and a pair of chocolate croissants. No wonder I’m such a bloater. I’m lucky to be alive.

The lack of nicotine is beginning to make me edgy. I’d kill for a cigarette. I’d maim and torture for a joint. But they’re right when they say it’s a gateway drug. If I had a joint now, by bedtime I’d be out of my mind on Maryland Cookies and Häagen-Dazs.

In response to the nicotine withdrawal, my fingers are twitching and I’m coughing like a consumptive, spitting up phlegm till I’m retching and short of breath. When my breath does come, it’s bad like a butcher’s latrine, and as I belch away heartburn, my mouth actually tastes brown. I feel awful. My mouth didn’t taste brown when I smoked. What’s going on? Nothing is right. I feel unhealthy, thick screams welling up in my head. I belch more brown and recoil from myself, shaking my wretched face and shivering.

‘Enough!’ I yell.

Pablo jerks his head and looks at me as if to say, ‘How many times have I told you not to do that? Jesus.’

‘Sorry, Pablo.’

But balls to January. I’m better than January. I’m better than one measly month, and I can beat these cravings. I made a promise to myself. I know I make promises to myself at a rate of two or three a week, and I know I really mean it every time, especially in January, but this time—I swear by St Münchhausen—it’s different.

This year I have eschewed New Year’s Resolutions in favour of the infinitely more grandiose ‘New Life Resolutions’, which are as follows:

1 Lose 8 Stone in Excess Body Fat and Become Fit and Healthy

2 Stop Smoking Cigarettes Completely and For Ever

3 Meet and Fall in Fully Reciprocated Love with the Woman of My Dreams

Furthermore, I have enlisted the help of the internet to keep me on the straight and narrow.

I have, as threatened, started a blog. As well as keeping track of my progress with the above resolutions—which I feel fall foul of neither trifling nor unfeasible—I hope that the blog will add monster strength to my convictions. Thus, I have confided in it in much the same way as one might confide in one’s harshest, most mean-spirited friends—friends you inform that you’ve given up smoking, just like that (you may click your fingers for emphasis), making a really big deal of it, shaking your head when they doubt your willpower, smiling all smug and wholly self-satisfied. You are Jesus. ‘O ye of little faith,’ you say, maybe even making a bet or two for good measure. You do all this knowing full well that if you fall from the wagon and fail, they will mock you and sneer at you and publicly humiliate you with a venom that will bring tears to your eyes. They will poke you mercilessly with verbal sticks of shame and cruelty until you weep openly, destroyed by their schadenfreude. Of course, this is exactly why you tell them in the first place. The fear you feel of your friends’ bitching and barbs spurs you on, perhaps even more than your fear of being eaten away by cancer.

So this is why I have started a blog. The blog will take the place of the mean-spirited friends I do not have. I have made grand claims on this blog. I am Jesus, smiling smug and self-satisfied, and fear of the potential opprobrium of feisty strangers is already keeping me focused and incentivised.

What this means, of course, is that I have to find readers. Apparently, the thing to do is to visit other people’s blogs, link and leave comments, create a trail of virtual breadcrumbs and ‘establish a presence’. So this is what I’ve been doing and, so far, I think it’s going quite well. People are coming. Also, interestingly, those that have come—so far, at least—are predominantly female. Which leads me to confront the very real possibility that if I blog well, which I fully intend to, there’s no reason that the Woman of My Dreams won’t happen upon my words and fall instantly, eternally in love with me.

No reason at all.

We shall see.

Of course, blogging is just one way in which the internet can aid me in my search for True Love. There are others. Which is why a few days ago I signed up to Love and Friends, ‘the online dating site for thinking people’. This sounds perfect. Not only does the term ‘thinking people’ describe me to a T, but also, almost certainly, the Woman of My Dreams.

Filling in the profile took me most of a long Sunday evening, but you can’t rush these things. Also, I think it’s essential to be honest, and if at all possible, brutally so. Asked to give my thoughts on the subject of ‘Sports and Exercise’, I wrote: ‘I’m a big man, but I’m out of shape. Horribly out of shape. In a word, I’m fat. In fact, I worked out my body mass index recently and I’m ashamed to report that I’m actually “severely obese”. But before you start sending me your salacious winks, you chubby-chasers, you should know that all this is about to change, just as soon as my coccyx is healed. Indeed, by the end of this year, my body will have become my temple, and I want you—yes, you!—to be first through the doors on worship day. (Friday.) And you don’t even have to take off your shoes. Although it would be the polite thing to do.’

I was, and remain, disproportionately pleased with that.

Asked to describe an ‘Enjoyable Evening Out’, I plumped for the following: ‘Buckets and buckets of dim sum followed by a film premiere in a swish Soho screening room, accompanied by the woman I love. Oh, and she’s in love with me too—I’m fed up with all that unreciprocated nonsense. Incidentally, I wrote the screenplay for the film we’re watching—I may even have directed it—and when it ends, the whole audience jumps to its feet and starts cheering. We can’t hear them, however, because we’re too busy doing it.’

Seriously, what thinking woman in her right mind would fail to fall for that kind of pizzazz? Well—as it turns out—all of them. In the four days since I ‘established my presence’, I’ve received precisely no interest. Neither an unsubscribe nor an ironic poke. I don’t really know why I was anticipating some interest, but I was. I guess I’m really not as amusing as I think I am.

Or, of course, it could just be the fact that I didn’t put up a picture of myself on my profile. I did consider it, but then I thought that doing so would be rather like praying to be picked for the school football team while sitting at the edge of the pitch in a wheelchair. So instead I put up a photo of the Elephant Man. Which, thinking about it, is rather like praying to be picked for the school football team while sitting at the edge of the pitch in a wheelchair, dressed as the Elephant Man.

I know it’s potentially counter-productive—although not necessarily—but I’m really not ready to put my face on the internet yet. Actually, there’s more to it than that.

In a nutshell, it’s a reaction to the fact that all my life I’ve been judged and persecuted because of the way that I look, because of the way my face is put together. The magnificent thing about the internet, and establishing a presence thereon, is that, robbed of the physical fact of my appearance, people are finally forced to react to what lies beneath the surface. They are forced to react—if you will—to the real me.

I’m fed up with being a freak show. Done with it. I’m done with the titters and the comments and the endless opinions. I’m done hearing, ‘Oh, you’re not that bad,’ and I’m especially done hearing, ‘Yeah, actually, I see what you mean.’ I’m done with all of that.

Now I exist in a place separate from my unpleasantly misshapen face, and that’s how I like it.

However, what’s good for the blog may not necessarily be good for the dating site. After all, I know that when I search for the Woman of My Dreams, I always tick the box that says ‘Photos Only’. I suppose my hoping that the Woman of My Dreams is not quite as superficial as I am—as well as wickedly beautiful—is probably a tad unfair.

Oh well. Balls then, to dating sites.

Thankfully, the internet is not yet out of ideas.

Last week I began frequenting chat rooms in earnest. In case you’ve never dabbled in such things, let me explain. Chat rooms are basically online spaces packed out with young people, the vast majority of whom—if my intuition holds water—are wasted teenage boys pretending they’re unusually attractive, sexually active, lexically unsophisticated, and incredibly non-discriminating women. However, I am convinced that there are genuine women in there too, and if you happen to have your wits about you, you can sometimes track one down.

After a few hours on my first night on chat patrol, I tracked one down.

For the next few days, we chatted intermittently, and after a couple of hour-long sessions, I’d say we knew one another fairly well. It was only in the early hours of this morning that the conversation began to take a turn towards the spicy. Her name was Grace. Or, quite possibly, his name was Grace. No matter. Although if he was a teenage boy pretending, then kudos to him. He was good.

So here, with permission, is my virtual cherry, all popped and pulsating…

wicked.grace: So do you want to ‘cyber’, as I believe the kids call it?

elbows: But I’m eating my banana and peanut butter sandwich.

wicked.grace: Well hurry up. I’m feeling sexy.

elbows: Oh my.

wicked.grace: What are you wearing?

elbows: Oh god, lots of clothes. It’s freezing in here at the moment. I think the heating’s busted. I keep meaning to have a word with the landlord but there just aren’t enough hours in the day. And he’s not the easiest person to get hold of at the best of times, let alone when I want something doing. You still feeling sexy?

wicked.grace: You’re not taking this seriously are you?

elbows: I’m sorry. Am I supposed to? Are you?

wicked.grace: A bit. Well, I was going to try and give it a try.

elbows: OK, hold on. Right. Sandwich finished. Now I just need to establish a couple of ground rules here—I’ve never done this before you see and I really don’t know how it works. So—am I supposed to tell the truth? Or just tell you what I think you want to hear?

wicked.grace: I’m not sure. The truth I guess. Maybe with a couple of sexy lies thrown in.

elbows: Really? OK, here we go. I’m wearing a large T-shirt with an amusing slogan on it (‘Warning: this T-shirt may contain tits’—hilarious), plus a big fisherman’s jumper, plus a woolly hat pulled down over my ears. On my bottom half, however, I’m wearing skin-tight sexy rubber pants, and no underwear. Woof!

wicked.grace: Hmmm.

elbows: What are you wearing?

wicked.grace: I’m wearing leather boots and tight blue jeans. On my top half I’m wearing a green shirt and a green scarf around my neck.

elbows: Long or short sleeves?

wicked.grace: Long sleeves, pulled up to the elbows.

elbows: Please don’t say ‘elbows’.

wicked.grace: Sorry. Long sleeves. I’m also wearing red lipstick and my hair is tied back in a pony tail.

elbows: Gosh, I’m becoming aroused already. It really works!

wicked.grace: Would you like me to take off some clothes?

elbows: I’m not sure. Is your heating working OK?

wicked.grace: Tip top, yeah. I’m actually quite warm.

elbows: OK then. Maybe you could slip something off.

wicked.grace: Will you join me?

elbows: OK then.

wicked.grace: I’ve loosened the scarf around my neck first. I’ve slipped it off and let it drop to the living room floor.

elbows: I’ve taken off my hat. And thrown it at the cat.

wicked.grace: I’ve undone the top button of my shirt. And the next.

elbows: You’ll be here all night at that rate. Hold on…There. I’m naked.

wicked.grace: Hmmm.

elbows: Nnngh! Nurk!