It’s been a difficult month.

That’s why I haven’t been writing much. December has not been easy, despite the fact that it started well enough. My annual about page update and a couple of blog posts aside, it’s been all quiet on the ILB Front for a while. This is some sort of an explanation why.

Simply put, whatever my focus may be at the time, ILB has always been a sex blog – explicit without being rude; sex-positive without being proselyting. I don’t need to be actually having sex to write about it (and, as it stands, I haven’t had sex for about a decade now). I have plenty of sex with myself, of course, and in many ways that is the extent of my sex life – I am completely okay with chatting about sex on the internet, and on account of the fact that I’ve been doing that since 2007, I think that should be relatively self-evident.

Jill the Plumber from the adult Flash game of the same name by Hard Core Toons.
She’s here to check my pipe.

Just before Christmas a workman came to replace a pipe in our boiler system. From basically that time we have had no central heating or hot water. I tried a few methods to compensate (blankets in various places; heating water in the kettle… I even turned on my broken and dangerous space heater once, all the electricity in the flat went out…), but nothing has really worked. Yesterday he came back, with a sidekick in tow, and they spent a while taking things apart. We had about an hour of heating before the system overloaded, water pressure maxed out and everything fizzled out.

I’ve just gotten over a chest and lung infection and I’m already feeling once again like icicles are forming inside my bloodstream. That’s how cold it is.

The amount of temperatures hovering just above zero have more or less put the kibosh on the vague “get back in touch with your sexual identity, you blithering idiot” aim I set for myself a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been having sexy thoughts and the occasional dirty dream – because of course I have, it’s me – but gone are the morning erections, the implications I’m prone to picking up in innocuous conversations, and even the excitement in anticipation of porn, and more porn to come. In fact, a couple of days ago I began to feel sick at even the thought of having sex. I turned off my PC and read a book for a while before looking for something to stream… hence the mention of Netflix in the title of this post.

I can’t think of anything to blame but the cold.

So that’s what I’m doing.

Yesterday afternoon I more or less forced myself to masturbate to orgasm, with the excuse that I was alone in the flat and had some time to myself. While this was, on the whole, a good idea – it certainly felt great and my orgasm was plentiful following days of not doing so – it still felt like there was something missing. Whatever it was. There was a vital piece of the whole process absent, and even my labyrinthine brain couldn’t figure out what it was. I’d been wanking and I came… so what was the issue there?

And yet, hours later, I went to bed solid as a rock, something both unheralded and unyielding.

This morning both workmen came back to check my pipe was leaking correctly. It isn’t – there’s still a variation in pressure. The central heating is back on (although it is still very chilly in my corner of the lounge), but intermittently. It’s almost like a binary switch. Stop, start. Stop, start. Stop, start.

I suppose that’s as good an analogy as I’m going to get. My sexuality is like my flat’s plumbing; it, too, is repetitively stop-start. There’s even a disconnect between the top and bottom halves of my body – my fingers are like ice; my penis a red-hot poker. While the re-appearance of hot water affords me the luxury of having a shower, the thought of taking my clothes off in order to do so is nothing short of terrifying. Would one do so, I wonder, in an Arctic floe?

More so lies the question: do I want to have sex with myself? It certainly felt OK. Not right. Not really. But OK.

It hasn’t been an easy month, and in reality, it hasn’t been an easy year overall. This is the time to look back and reflect, and the more I look at 2025, the more I see it as a milieu of the occasional bright spot in amongst a grey mulch of nothing much else.

Possibly the word “meh” has never been so accurate.

But still.

Forward we move. However cold that might be. We cannot avoid, so we carry our cold with us.

And if anyone has any woolly gloves, that’s be great, cheers.