It’s 11:30 pm on my first day at university and I’m wanking feverishly in a stall in the toilets of the union bar. It’s club night and my fap fap fap is masked by the thump thump thump from just outside. I’ve never been clubbing before, but here, everybody does it.

That is not all everybody seems to be doing. The sexual energy from the heaving mass of sweaty bodies is electric. As it turns out later, not everyone was having sex with everyone else, but for the majority of us, this is the first day of freshers’ week which, sixth form told us, was specifically reserved for sex with someone new. In this very bar, on the dancefloor outside, I will have incidents where I don’t want to cheat, and those where I’ll fail to get laid. I just don’t know this yet.

Outside this bar bathroom, the milieu continues unabated. The freshers’ reps are all called things like RAUNCHY, PLAYMATE and KING SNAKE. It’s become common knowledge that GIANT does, in fact, have a rather small penis, but he’s been sleeping with half the freshers, which makes it okay. About an hour earlier I had been talking with a pretty blonde who then vanished from view. Her equally pretty best friend apologised on her behalf – she had a boyfriend – but that didn’t bother me, as I was just chatting.

I’d also come to university as someone in a long-term relationship. Engaged, actually. In the unlikely event that I did get any leads to be having the kind of wild and carefree sex I never ended up having, I wouldn’t be following them up on account of the fact that I was in a relaionship.

I am wanking in the toilet because I feel that, despite how out of place I seem to be, and how what is going on elsewhere doesn’t affect me, I deserve, on this very first night, my own sexual experience, so I’m giving it to myself, no matter how desperate or unclean or pathetic this all is. I’m going to have an orgasm here, tonight, and nobody else will know, and that will be mine. Just something that I can do.

Also, I’m horny.

I don’t yet know that the following three years will be an era of sexual self-discovery. That I will feel both the closest to and the furthest away from death than ever before, and that I will emerge from the whole experience having had no more sex, but aware of the sort I wanted to be having. I haven’t even been to a lecture yet.

There’s no way of knowing which way this is going.

I have my first orgasm of semi-independent life standing up, in a bar bathroom stall. Whatever happened next, nobody was going to take that away from me.