The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? (Just to give you an idea, Proust's reply was 'To be separated from Mama.') I think that the lowest depth of misery ought to be distinguished from the highest pitch of anguish. In the lower depths come enforced idleness, sexual boredom, and/or impotence. At the highest pitch, the death of a friend or even the fear of the death of a child.

I don't mind admitting that I, too, have watched Hilton undergoing the sexual act. I phrase it as crudely as that because it was one of the least erotic such sequences I have ever seen. She seemed to know what was expected of her and to manifest some hard-won expertise, but I could almost have believed that she was drugged. At no point did her facial expression match even the simulacrum of lovemaking.

Ever since I discovered that my god given male member was going to give me no peace, I decided to give it no rest in return.

Erections could be like cops: often there when you emphatically didn’t require them and sometimes absent when you did. Or so I have been told by friends who thought they could trust me.