Q & Exhibit A (2)

Enough time has gone by since I wrote the first half of this that I should probably answer the rest of the questions in a new post, rather than tacking them on to the original one. For the next few hours I’ll be jumping back and forth between work, writing, Wimbledon, and the World Cup, so I’m going to post these in batches, with the aim of getting them all up by the end of the evening. If anyone has additional questions for the list, kindly fuck off feel free to send them over!

Right then, here we go:

What’s the best approach to pick up a man in a social setting? Be witty? Eye contact? Inappropriate amounts of cleavage? What if you are shy and can only manage to stammer and look away quickly when he catches your eye?

Jeez, that’s a tough one. It kind of depends on the guy in question, doesn’t it? I mean, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, just as there isn’t when it comes to picking up women. For example, some guys will be charmed and intrigued by the whole stammering/looking away thing, especially if they think they’ve directly inspired such shyness. Others will respond to a more forthright, confident approach. I guess what I would say is that while wit, eye contact and cleavage might be a turn-off for some men, they’re probably not the guys you want to fuck anyway; if they find those things actively unattractive, it suggests they have fairly ‘traditional’ views on how women ought to behave.

If you want to know how to pick me up, then yes, wit and cleavage would certainly represent a good start. I don’t often get chatted up (not in ‘social settings’, anyway), so the direct approach tends to work best – if you’re too subtle about it, I probably won’t realise you’re interested.

Did you ever have a crush on a teacher or professor?

Yes, though I’m afraid it’s not a very interesting story. I was 17, hormonal, bookish, and apparently invisible to women; she was young, attractive, passionate about Victorian poetry, and keen to tell me how brilliant she thought I was. Of course I fell in love with her. Nothing ever happened, because she was a teacher and I was a spotty, sweaty teenager, but I did get a lot of good wanking material out of the year I spent in her classroom.

I also had a slightly severe Politics professor at Oxford, who must have been in her mid-30s when she taught me, and while I wouldn’t say I ever had a crush on her, she did inspire some of my earliest fantasies about femdom and older women.

Have you ever run into a situation where someone ran into your blog who shouldn’t have? (Co-worker, boss[!], friend from school, sibling, etc). How did it turn out?

‘Shouldn’t have’ is a slippery little term in that context. Have I had to deal with someone who I didn’t want to find my blog stumbling upon it? Yes. However, you could ask that the person in question had a right to read it, so I’m not sure that counts. Otherwise (touch wood), I’ve been very lucky so far: either my family/friends/colleagues/etc haven’t found my blog, or they’ve been decent enough to keep quiet about doing so. Long may that continue!

Actually, it’s not something I spend too much time worrying about. I have around 300 followers on Twitter, and over the last few months have averaged just over 150 blog hits a day. In the context of the wider population, those numbers are very small, so the chances of someone I know finding it by accident are pretty slim – I just don’t have that kind of profile. If it happens, it’ll be because I do something monumentally stupid (type the wrong email address, for example), or because someone is malicious enough to expose me, and there’s not much I can do about either of those things, beyond sort of vaguely trying not to piss anyone off too much. I suppose it’s why I’m a bit less guarded about my anonymity these days than I used to be.

Who, out of all the people you have ever slept with, would you most like to spend a day in bed with and why? One who it isn’t actually possible to, i.e. an ex that you fell out with or now hate.

I received so many interesting questions that it’s hard to pick a favourite, but if you really twisted my arm, this is the one I’d go for. It’s certainly the one I’ve spent the most time thinking about. For starters, what criteria should I use? Should I pick whichever woman was ‘best’ in bed? Or someone I didn’t get enough time with? Or maybe I should go for someone from way back, when I didn’t know what I was doing in bed, and show them everything I’ve learned since then? Seriously, there are so many ways I could go with this.

The way the question’s worded does help though. If it has to be someone unattainable, that rules out various exes who I could, in theory, jump back into bed with. I think I can also forget about any I ‘hate’; a one-off hate-fuck would be pretty hot, I guess, but I’m not sure I want to spend a whole day lying next to someone I despise.

Who does that leave? Well, there are the ones who are married (or otherwise monogamously attached), the ones who now date women (and there are actually two of those), the ones who live thousands of miles away, and I guess there are the ones who, for reasons both good and bad, wouldn’t pick up the phone if they saw that it was me calling.

Hmm…that’s still a pretty long list. Anyway, after agonising over it for a few days, I managed to whittle it down to two. Let’s call them Diana and Rebecca.

I met Diana on a train. Actually, I’d spotted her about 20 minutes beforehand, in the rush-hour melee on the concourse at Paddington. Just for a second, the crowd thinned out and she materialised in front of me, small and pale and calm. She had dark hair and big tits, but those weren’t what I noticed at first; this will sound stupid, but as soon as we made eye contact, I could tell that she was interesting. I lost sight of her after that, but as I squeezed my way down the aisle on the train back home, she reappeared at one of the tables, opposite an empty seat. By the time I stepped out onto the platform in Swindon an hour later, I was completely smitten.

Diana lived (and still lives) with her boyfriend in Bristol. Every Tuesday, she went up to London to study for her part-time Psychology degree, and for the couple of months after that first encounter I met her each week at the station afterwards, for the trip back out west. It didn’t matter whether I needed to go that way or not, nor did I mind having to hang around for an hour or two before leaving London: the pleasure of her company was enough to make it worth the effort. There was an easy intimacy between us. We’d buy a bottle of wine, squeeze into the first seats we could find, and spend the little time we had together just talking non-stop. Not chatting: talking. I found myself storing up thoughts, ideas, and all sorts of interesting little nuggets during the week, to share with her on our journeys. Just thinking about her made me smile.

The sex was probably a mistake. It happened shortly after I moved to London: she came to visit one Saturday, and suddenly we had the luxury of a whole day together. We picnicked in the park, we went to the Tate, and after a couple of hours spent wandering through the streets together, we ate dinner down by the river, in the last of the evening sunshine. It was basically the perfect date…except, of course, neither of us could acknowledge it as anything other than a day out with a friend. Later that night, we settled down onto my bed to watch a movie, and it was only then that we both plucked up the courage to confront what was happening.

We had sex. Once. It was tender and passionate and heart-thumpingly exciting, all at the same time, but it was also terribly fragile. We clung to each other in an effort to stop it all spinning out of control, and I could hardly breathe for fear that this glorious thing we’d stumbled into was about to slip away. Which, of course, it did. After a few minutes, she looked me in the eye and said “no, I’m sorry, I can’t do this.” And so we stopped.

There’s a lot more to the story. The short version is that although Diana and I are still very good friends, those few excruciatingly wonderful minutes marked both the beginning and the end of what might have been something more. Since then, just enough distance has crept into our conversations to prevent a repeat of that night, but there’s still a part of me that wishes…that wishes…

Yeah, so she’s definitely a candidate.

With Rebecca, it’s a lot easier to explain. Our two sets of parents were university friends, and each year we’d visit her family in France as part of our summer holiday. Rebecca was six months younger than me, and my first real crush; I mean, come on, she was glamorous and French, and we used to run around half-naked on the beach together…even at the age of 11 I’m not really sure I stood much of a chance. I mooned after her for years, but nothing ever happened, and once I stopped going on holiday with my parents, we gradually lost touch.

Fast forward to 2010, and my sister’s wedding. I had just been dumped, she was there with her brother rather than her boyfriend, we both had a shitload to drink…did I mention that she’s French? She was sharing a bed with her brother at a local B&B, and while he went out on the town, she and I staggered back to their room and collapsed into bed together.

I’d love to be able to say that what came next lived up to all my teenage fantasies, but sex rarely works like that, especially when you’ve drunk your body weight in wine. We sort of fumbled around for a bit: I went down on her; she reached for my cock and tried to get me hard; one of us somehow managed to locate a condom; and that was pretty much it. No erection, no hot fuck, and no happy ending to the story I’d written so many times in my head over the years. When I woke up the next morning to find her brother asleep on the floor of the room, tangled up with one of my sister’s best (male) friends, the whole thing felt even more surreal.

What saved the situation is that we were able to laugh about it afterwards. As she said over breakfast (with a Gallic shrug), we’d known each other for so long that it was bound to happen at some point, and neither of us felt embarrassed by how the night had ended. However, while I don’t really think of it as a missed opportunity, there’s still a part of me that would like to be able to go back and do it properly – or to stay holed up in that hotel room with her for just one more night.

So there you go: Diana and Rebecca. Rebecca and Diana. Tough choice.

Can’t I just have both?

On the fluffier end of things, I’m always curious about what people would choose for their final meal, so in that spirit, what would you wish for your final sexual experience if it could be anything you wanted, from the most profane to the most profound?

Fuck, I don’t know! That’s like the whole ‘favourite song/book’ thing: essentially a question I don’t want to answer because it’s too fucking hard. But ok, I’ll give it a go.

Given that you specified a sexual experience, I’m tempted to cheat a bit, and pick an orgy. After all, that would give me the opportunity to cram in all sorts of good stuff, and I’m pretty sure I’d die happy at the end of it. Not sure that’s really in the spirit of the question though.

Ok, how about this. Back in August, I went to a trade fair in Birmingham. Manning one of the stalls was this incredible, devastatingly intelligent, pre-Raphaelite beauty…but with massive tits and a Geordie accent. We chatted, we flirted, we snuck off and drank beer together; at the end of it all, we exchanged business cards, and three months later she flew over for a dirty long weekend in Poland.

We agreed that on the first night, we’d just chill out and get to know each other a bit better. Sure, there was some kissing, but neither of us really wanted to jump the gun. We needed to build a bit of trust, and confirm that the chemistry we’d felt in Birmingham was not merely the result of boredom and lukewarm Carlsberg.

The following morning, I dressed for work. Florence (as we’ll call her) wrapped herself in my duvet and watched me dash around the bedroom through sleepy, sexy eyes. When I was ready to leave, she looked me up and down, then took me by the hand and pulled me back over to the bed. She sat on the edge of the mattress, naked apart from the duvet, and planted her feet either side of mine. I had time to take one deep breath, and then this 24-year-old machine unzipped my trousers, pulled out my cock, and proceeded to make me come in her mouth in about 45 seconds flat.

Seriously, I’ve never felt anything like it, either before or since. To this day, I’m not quite sure how she did it; all I know is that the second she took me in her mouth, my knees buckled and my eyes rolled back in my head. After she’d gulped down every last drop of cum, Florence zipped me back up, curled a hand round the back of my neck, kissed me hard, and sent me off to work.

Lots of women tell me they’re great at giving head: some really are, some really aren’t, and most are kind of in the middle. Florence told me that too. Florence delivered. It was awesome.

In this post, I briefly mentioned that I’d had cause to revise some of the indifference to blowjobs that I expressed eight months earlier in this post. Florence is basically the reason for that revision. If I had to pick a ‘final sexual experience’, I could certainly do a lot worse.