Category: Personal (Page 1 of 14)

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that this would be obvious, right? I’ve been doing it every year for ages and I’ve even got a special code for it, and I never fail to record them in my diary and I still forgot to do this post? I have no excuse – it’s not like I haven’t got the time for an orgasm count, or even that this is particularly difficult content to write. I simply overlooked it.

This time last year I was in a rather sombre mood. Nothing was particularly wrong; it’s probably the fact that nothing was perfect, either. In 2025 a few things actually did go wrong, but then again, I did have a few perfect days.

I have written a paltry 28 blog posts in 2026. Granted that does average out to more than two per month, or one every two weeks, but that’s hardly anything when you consider that I’m a blogger who used to write at least one post every day. 2024 Escape Velocity would have been more than 40 posts, which doesn’t seem that difficult! I could have – nay, should have – done more blogging, and less worrying about not blogging! Brilliant. Story of my life!

The fact that my most popular post this year was based on somebody else’s interpretation of somebody else’s idea both gives me an idea of what people want to read and reminds me of the recycled ideas in The Machine Stops. How much that actually tell you about me, I’ve no idea.

It’s my job to tell you about me, SO HERE WE GO…

Finally, The Actual Orgasm Count

Once again I’m about to attempt to decode my handwriting, which is so awful it’s becoming a Cain’s Jawbone-style logic puzzle as opposed to simple reading. In order to make it slightly easier to decrypt, I shall defer to my own super secret secret squirrel code, to whit:

☆ – 69. This is the number of orgasms that I’ve had this year. Yes, really. 69. You couldn’t have made this up – let’s have a cheer!

Maths tells me that’s an orgasm per day on 18.9% of the year. Is that good for a 40-year-old man? I genuinely have no idea. But, still. 69! Nobody’s going to take that sort of wanking victory away from me!

🙂 (not an actual emoji; it’s a sideways =)) or, more often, ☆! – 22/3; 17/6; 21/7; 7/11 (the date, not the shop); 12/9, 4/12. These are the days on which I had an orgasm which was, in some way or another, remarkable. I didn’t generally add notes as to what I found exceptional about these wanks… apart from…

FX: Three dramatic chords.

28/9 – This was an absolute record-breaker, earning itself no less than four modifiers, each appended with an exclamation mark and with no further explanation than: Satisfying! Leana! Plentiful! BOING!!!

X2 – 15/2. You’ll be shocked to find out that this is nothing to do with the PlayStation title from 1996 which is a sequel to 1992’s Project-X. It’s simply the one day on which I had two orgasms – both routine, neither one spectacular, but both giving me the relief I needed. You’ll realise from the date that this was the day after Valentine’s, but I’m not sure what that indicates…

Where are the new codes for 2025, you unoriginal, repetitious talentless hack?

There aren’t any.

This wasn’t deliberate. Stopping short of trying to describe the minutiae of every orgasm I’ve had – my diaries are never that resilient and there isn’t enough pen ink in the world! – it would be a knightmare to even attempt to do that, or even thinking up new codes!

Apologies if you were looking forward to this bit…

I really wasn’t.

Then, all things being equal, it seems a very appropriate way to end this post.

With a heading? You can’t do that.

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.

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.

I’ve been
Waiting a long time
For this
Moment to come, I’m
Destined
For anything at all

“Oh, interestingly, exciting news.”

My mother pulled on the brakes and her bike screeched to a halt just before the entrance to the alleyway. It led to the park – this I knew – and I also knew I wouldn’t be able to say anything as we rode down it single file.

“Oh yes? Do tell?”
“Well…”

When I stopped, the iconic plinking sound which accompanied my cycles finished their usual tune (which I can still hear – the spokey-dokeys from Monster Munch were placed on randomly, and since I liked the melody, I kept them on that way), and fell silent.

I cleared my throat.

The problem was – and I realised this a fraction of a second too late – that I didn’t actually have exciting news. At the age of ten, nothing in particular seemed to count as exciting. Getting a new Usborne Puzzle Adventures book was an event. Maybe I’d get a SNES game once a year, for birthday and/or Christmas. Those things were exciting.

But I still hadn’t experienced anything which could be categorised as “exciting news”. My mother’s disappointment when I followed my declaration up with a joke she’d heard before was palpable. I went home glum that afternoon, feeling somehow that I’d cheated myself out of a genuinely exciting event. There wasn’t one, of course, but if I hadn’t said anything, I wouldn’t have upset myself.

A few years later, as a teenager, I found myself, once again, waiting. The sort of exciting news I thought I might get had evolved, in a way, although I still didn’t know exactly what I was waiting for. Nine times out of ten, of course, it was me waiting to get a girlfriend. I would tease the audience with silhouettes of practically all the girls in my life, keeping them guessing.

I didn’t know, of course, but then neither did the audience. We’d find out at the same time. That would have been exciting.

Age 17 was probably a little too exciting… or, at least, it was at the beginning. Very little of it could be categorised as news, however. I had my coach journeys and my girlfriend and my sex – not to mention the A2s I was taking (in a much better mood than my ASs – and I got better grades in a better mood!). But I still felt, in a way, like I was waiting for something.

I still had no idea exactly what it was. As far as I was aware, I had what I’d been waiting for. And yet, still, I felt like I should be waiting for something. Something which I could tell the audience, or at the very least my mother, was “interestingly, exciting news”.

I’ve since gone through four relationships, had at least ten forms of gainful employment, visited the most distant country of two foreign continents, been seen on stage and screen and read in print, saved at least two lives, and learned more about sex than I ever thought I would.

I’m still waiting.