Category: Recollections (Page 1 of 9)

Recently I managed to reconnect with an old friend who I haven’t seen for years. Mostly business – I had some data I wanted to share with him – but, over time, the banter started up. I haven’t seen him for about a decade and it’s almost like we’ve never not been in touch.

Which makes me wonder what happened to everyone else.

Okay, I’m hyperbolising. Not everyone. I am well aware where most of my friends are (including, but not really counting, the ones who live ten to fifteen minutes away and thank you London Buses!). The ones I’ve been thinking about – wondering about – dreaming about, even. Those who have faded from view.

There are also those who I was friendly with, but wouldn’t really count as friends. There’s the girl who used to touch herself while talking to me on MSN. The one who would e-mail me after every blog post with compliments and hopes for the future. The SaLT who wanted my dick. Someone I was introduced to “because she’s a Christian as well, so you’ll like her”; she was open and easy with sharing her sexual escapades, and once told me

Beaver says:
theres this guy and hes askin me all sorts of things, like whether i prefer speed or depth and if ive ever taken it up the arse

ILB says:
And you’re just telling him?

Beaver says:
well he asked!

ILB says:
If I asked, would you tell me?

Beaver says:
lol

Beaver says:
speed

Beaver says:
and ive never taken it up the arse

Then there are those who has a profound effect on my sexual development. The friend I had who I told practically everything. The ex of a friend of an ex who wouldn’t stop talking about how horny she was. The acquaintance who not only had a crush on me, but also recommended porn for me to download. My colleague who had a thing for sex GIFs and hotel rooms. There are those, of course, who I did have sex with… and those who I didn’t.

All of the above are gone. The dearth of IM systems in favour of microblogging social networks is, I think, a major contribution to that,

[Side Note: IRC is still going strong. There are people I met on various IRC networks who I still talk to, but that depends on the network, and Real Life getting in the way. And, of course, people who vanish from IRC are often impossible to trace.]

which is a shame – no matter how much I like social networking. Can you even have these kind of conversations in meatspace? I’m sure I’ve overheard some stuff, but I do have to wonder how much of it is genuine memory, or just something I think I’ve heard once.

No matter. There aren’t likely to any very horny, very explicit women hitting me up on social media or messenger apps specifically to tell me the sort of stuff women used to hit me up on social media or messenger apps specifically to tell me. But it is nice, in a comforting sort of way, to connect with an old internet friend… even if it is all above board…

…and I won’t be touching myself while thinking about him…

…intentionally.

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.

I didn’t know who J.D. Vance was until this morning, and now I almost wish I still didn’t.

Note the “almost”. I’m dismayed, but not surprised, that there are people that abhorrent still seeking office in 2024. What I am surprised by is how many people are taking about how JDV didn’t have sex with a sofa. I mean, of course he has. Look at his face and then tell me that man has never been caught in flagrante delicto with his nan’s favourite settee. It’s impossible to deny. I notice he hasn’t openly done so, which means he has something to hide.

Back in my late teens I used to get horny while watching Robot Wars. This wasn’t really a deliberate thing, nor am I particularly turned on by chrome; I just did once and it put the idea into my brain somehow. I’d go to Woodcraft just after Robot Wars finished, and since my main activity after Woodcraft was going home and crying, that was my Horny Time. I may have missed a bit of metal carnage now and then, but I was happy with that.

I’m not going to say the couch in the living room took the brunt of my horniness, but then I can’t say it didn’t play its part.

To my credit, though, unlike JDV I didn’t actually fuck the sofa. I’d have had to take my trousers off, and although in the end I always did, this usually happened after the show had finished… and often in my bedroom (where there wasn’t a piece of household furnishings to shag), or the bathroom. Back in these halcyon days, of course, I didn’t masturbate to orgasm, so I wouldn’t have left a stain…

…but I digress.

The invisible, intangible and completely fictional person my teenage self would have sex with – before Karolina, but after the “My Girl” I fantasised about at 14… I should write about her as well, at some point – could manifest in pretty much any room of the house, but it was easier to conjure her up in the lounge than anywhere else. Occasionally, of course, this would happen in my bedroom (what I charmingly referred to in my head as “sex fests” taking place on my bed, occasionally with the devil fellah). Sometimes the bathroom would be a better place to do it.

But it was easier, especially since I didn’t have to move that much, to just dry-hump the Chesterfield, using the pillows for support. Job done. I did, of course, run the risk of breaking it – it wasn’t the strongest in the world – but years later and I was having sex on it with the Seamstress, so it clearly survived that long.

So, although I wouldn’t say I had sex with my sofa, like JDV clearly has, I had sex on it, at least once with someone who wasn’t there; I may well have fucked my sofa, as a result: I was a seriously weird kid and did all sorts of odd things. This would just be one more thing to add to the list.

Won’t be doing anything on – or to – our new, inherited sofa, though. It may well be called a love seat… but that’s a compound noun… not an instruction!