“Everyone gets one page,” said Lightsinthesky. “You get one page; you can write whatever you want. Or draw something. But you only get one… pink and jeans! Pink and jeans! What is it with pink and jeans?! …page.”
“What if you finish your notebook?” I asked innocently. “Do you get another page in the second one?”
“I haven’t thought about…”
“Wait. What was that about pink and jeans?”
“Pink and jeans? Where?” he half-yelled, suddenly tensing in high alert like a startled meerkat.

I can’t really explain whether it was a 2002 thing or entirely localised around our borough, or even our school. Wearing a pink top paired with blue jeans (and, often, a large belt) had become a thing. As far as I was aware, it wasn’t even a deliberate fashion; it was just… a thing that happened.

I quite liked the look; Lightsinthesky – for whatever reason – hated it.

Being friends with Lightsinthesky came with its certain caveats: he liked to be addressed as “dude”; you could read one of his books but he would have probably drawn a cartoon of you somewhere there; he would invariably become interested in anything with a pulse (and fell in love with someone else every single day); he didn’t make much sense.

And he had his phrases.

“My God, that woman’s got a huge arse.”
“People will lose body parts.”
“Fluff! Aah-aah! Fluff of the universe!”
“Yes, she is intensely shaggable.”
“Look at her, she’s nice.”
“Totally blown away.”
“Don’t start activating my annoying meter.”
“Pink and jeans! Why? Why do they all wear pink and jeans?”

For that, none of us had an answer. There was no reason the girls in our sixth form shouldn’t wear that combination. It wasn’t something the boys wore, even the gay ones – it was a cis girl thing. And, although I didn’t mind it as much as Lightsinthesky did (his vitriol was unfounded), he had a point: wearing pink and jeans was increasing.

Following one particularly amusing lunchtime where I genuinely thought he’d pass out from all the yelling he was doing (as it may as well have been Jeans for Genes Day judging by what we saw), I finally bit the bullet and asked.

“Oh, it’s just easy,” said my unconcerned friend. “Jeans are comfortable and some tops are pink. It’s not deliberate, it’s just a thing that…”
“…thing that happens, yeah. I got it,” I helpfully added, pausing as Lightsinthesky’s latest tirade against the combination of fuchsia and cyan floated through the wall. “It just seems to irritate Lightsinthesky, that’s all.”

There was a pause.

“Of course it does,” she tinkled with a grin. “Why do you think we do it so much?”

A couple of days later I talked him into letting her have a page of his second “book of dude”. Her contribution consisted mostly of drawing of houses, trees, hills, the sun and the text “PINK & JEANS RULES THE WORLD!” in bold black writing.

I don’t think he ever got over it.

As far as I’m concerned, though, I don’t suit blue jeans, but one of the looks I find sexiest is someone wearing jeans on their lower half, with nothing on top at all…

…ladies.

I don’t know which path you’re taking
If it’s bent or straight
All I know is I’ve found something
That will take me home again

It’s the middle of summer and school is a distant memory. I’m lying on my back in the overgrown field of grass near the local estate that used to belong to a stately home. The home itself is now a café; the grounds are open to everyone. The Sun is high, her heat radiating down onto us. I’m relaxed – more so than I have been in days. Weeks, even.

I’m not a happy person. Recently I’ve been turned down by the one person I ever thought to ask out. Depression comes and goes, seemingly at random. This is a rare moment of calm in the maelstrom of doom and gloom that my life has become.

I am horny, of course. But that’s to be expected. I’m hard nearly all of the time and, since I don’t masturbate, there’s very little way of getting rid of the shameful horn. I don’t think any of them have noticed, although right now I don’t really care. I’m relaxed. That’s all I need.

We have been here for a couple of hours. Earlier on, we listened to a singing competition on the radio VW brought with him, in which various people of our age sang the female verse from Teenage Dirtbag to win a small cash prize. The Floof was discoursing loudly about how attractive her boyfriend was. Most other people were being quiet, but very handsomely so.

“HEY, LOOK!” VW yelled at one point. “I’VE GOT TWO GRASSHOPPERS HAVING SEX ON MY HAND!” (Maybe it was the mention of sex that set me off. I’ve no idea.)

But that was a while ago. We’ve had food and drinks, and we’re now just lazing about on the grass. I’m nearly asleep… and I may well be, were I not so horny. There’s a dull thud emanating from the throb of my hardness, echoing through my body in time with my heartbeat. I can practically hear it reverberating through the dry grass I’m lying on… the soil below… the planet.

Relaxed. Horny.

And none of the people around me have any idea.

If I could have sex now, I think – and not for the first time – I would. I don’t care what anyone else thinks. I’d have sex here and now, under the heat and in the long grass.

Someone says something at some point and we start to make our way slowly back home while VW talks at some length about DragonBall Z. I’m only half-listening, walking along unsteadily while my erection begins to melt away and I feel more comfortable in the khaki trousers I’ve been wearing.

I get home, cool off and have a long, cold drink. I lie back on the little sofa in my room and take a few deep, steadying breaths…

…and, within a few minutes, I’m hard again.

From years 7 to 10, under the leading light of our Head of Music, Einstein, Music Man and I would spend Wednesday lunchtimes and Thursday afternoons in Jazz Band rehearsals.

Jazz band was a bit of an odd duck. We were a school that didn’t have an orchestra. Choir – although I had been the sole boy chorister in primary school – was an option I didn’t plump for, and although strings group came and went (although I was in every incarnation of the same), jazz band had more staying power.

There were more of us in jazz band, basically.

Okay, so, Big Spender is a really sleazy song, so try to play in a… I don’t know, think… think Michael Portillo.

music teacher

For all the work we did, however, it was quite clear that the rest of the school had basically forgotten we existed. Every Christmas we got to sit on the stage, rather than the uncomfortable wooden seats of the local chapel, playing a random assemblage of carols. Put strings group and jazz band together and you had something approaching an orchestra, even if it had at least one member playing pizzicato violin because he’d forgotten his bow and the IT teacher on electric bass.

24 years later and I’ve suddenly realised how sexy that was.

Nobody saw it as sexy at the time. Music was something that nerds did; it wasn’t football or athletics or computing (I was also in the calligraphy club, and the five-member French Internet club, just to prove how uncool I was). It wasn’t even a rock band so it wasn’t great music. We were all enjoying ourselves, but very few other people were enjoying our existence, especially the people who had to walk past out cacophonous renditions in order to get into the maths cupboard.

The thing is, however, that it was sexy.

Nobody saw this at the time, but the ability to play an instrument is a skill. While it may have been abundantly true that nobody wanted to kiss, never mind shag, the gawky violinist in the band that didn’t exist for most of the year, the fact remains that he played the violin, so might be quite skilled with his fingers. Those who fellated reeds before playing may have been accomplished kissers. Drummers would undeniably have a certain amount of rhythm.

And then there’s the fact that it’s music. Everybody likes music. Sneer though they might have done during the year, the faceless mass would still sing along to the carols every December, and rock out to Teenage Dirtbag by the time the sixth form rolled around. Nevertheless, nobody ever thought that anything we were doing was particularly attractive.

I look back at it now and I can’t think of it as anything but.

I went back to playing jazz at university. And, by that point, we were too cool to care…

…but people still failed to notice our existence.

“Do you know what I’m going to do?” she said. “I’m going to spread my legs.”
“That’s a bit early,” I replied. “I thought you were waiting until you were married. Or has that gone out of the window now you’re 16?”

Her boyfriend shifted uncomfortably. There had been plenty of stories about them deliberately not spending time together ‘just in case we have sex’. A year or so later, of course, I had no such qualms. I both admired their steadfastness and was baffled by it in equal measure.

“No, that’s not what I mean,” said the Floof. “I mean I’m going to do it here. Now.”

I looked up into the sky and indicated the summer sun beating down on us. Our picnic had quickly devolved into inane chatter and we were now just killing time before church. Spread legs were a new topic.

“I think people are watching,” I pointed out in mock scandalised tones. “Why don’t you do so in your bedroom tonight instead?”
“No, I want to do it now,” she insisted. “I want to know what it feels like for a boy.”

I rolled my eyes. Zounds, was it this again?

Much as I liked the Floof, she did have some ideas about gender which I found a little outdated. She was, after all, the one who always wanted to hug me, but not when I was crying because ‘boys don’t cry and I don’t know what to do in that situation’. She wrote me a letter once in which she assumed that ‘when we’re young we all think our daddy is the strongest man in the world’. At one point, she also clearly thought I was gay. No reason, she just did.

One of the things that she had brought up – and one I genuinely hadn’t thought about before – was that boys always sit with their legs apart, whereas girls never do. That was the way genders sat, and since she didn’t believe trans or NB people existed, they didn’t get a mention.

As a boy who had, in his own sixteen years of existence, had his legs in all sorts of positions when sitting, I was a little confused by this. In her very long elucidation of the subject she had also mentioned that, the more confident the boy was, the wider apart his legs would get.

Yes, you read that correctly.

The amount of male confidence is in direct correlation to the distance between their knees when in a sitting position.

this is what the floof actually believed

Much as I didn’t agree, once she’d said that, I couldn’t unsee it. While I could get the concept that external genitalia made it slightly more comfortable to sit with one’s legs slightly apart, there were clearly some rowdy boys at school who were keen to show off their manly confidence by taking up as much space as possible. There was one guy in my class who seemingly spent most of his time trying to do an impression of a croquet hoop.

I’m genuinely surprised they didn’t start walking like that, doing the waddle that cowboys in westerns do.

“Anyway,” said the Floof, “boys do it, so I’m going to.”

At which she unsealed her legs, spread them akimbo, and immediately experienced some kind of transcendental experience. Her eyes shone with an immediate realisation of a better world, all the other light in the immediate vicinity dimmed in comparison to her pure radiance, and an exclamation mark appeared in the air above her head.

“Hey!” she trilled. “This is really comfortable! It’s no wonder boys like to sit like this. I’m going to have to do this more often!”
“Not in church, I trust.”
“Well, no, not right in front of the minister. I mean, what would he think?”
“I don’t know. Probably that you’re getting comfortable, I suppose.”

At which point a rounders ball came out of nowhere and hit her right between her thighs.

“AAAAAAAAH! MY FANNY!!!” she yelled, in a way I’m sure her minister would have not approved. “That does it! This might be comfortable, but I’m never opening my legs again!”

But, considering the fact that she later married the boyfriend and now has two children with him, I’m fairly sure she did so… eventually.