sort of hand-holding, occasional kissing type I’d had before, but a full-blown, boob-groping, bike-shed kind of one. I really fancied a girl called Evelyn Beanie, but she wasn’t at all interested in me. Outrageous, I know, but I still wasn’t exactly what you’d call ‘a catch’, and I was very inexperienced in matters of the heart. I just wanked a lot.
I never used to get any Valentine’s cards and every time that ‘special day’ rolled around it was like a form of torture because everyone used to boast about how many cards they’d received and my granny’s handwriting was always distinguishable. I was the person who would organise for the other boys to send roses and cards to girls via the school. I was the cupid and the one the teachers selected to organise everything. You could send a rose to someone you liked and add it on to your school bill so your parents ended up paying for it at the end of the year, but I always sent them to the really popular girls and never received any myself. Tragic.
I think the bottom line is that I was a loser. I didn’t help myself either, for when the opportunity came to be in charge of the headmaster’s fish tank I jumped at it, granting me the nickname ‘Fishy’. While other people were busy groping the go-getter Tiffany, Fishy here was busy making sure the pH levels of the water in the tank were accurate. I know I’ve said I love all things to do with marine life, but I think this was taking it a bit far, even for me.
The squash courts were the place to go if you wanted to get down and dirty with someone. There were always stories about girls being felt up in the viewing gallery. It was legendary. I think every school has such a spot. There was one girl – who shall remain nameless – who had a real reputation for getting groped by virtually every single guy in school. She made Tiffany the go-getter look like a right prude. Apart from me, I might add; I was probably busy feeding the fish.
Looking back, I thank God that I didn’t end up with my hand down anyone’s pants because I wouldn’t have had a clue what I was doing. It would be years before I had any understanding of the female form.
I remember learning about the, I guess you could say, technical side of sex while sitting in a science lab, playing with the gas taps to distract myself from the horror that was unfolding in front of me. Some poor teacher was made to stand facing a classroom of 14-year-olds and slide a condom over a banana as the entire room looked on in mortified fascination. It was about breeding, not pleasure, it seemed they were saying. I guess they were trying to make it sound as unsexy as possible so we wouldn’t all go home and do it, underage. I should have been so bloody lucky!
I honestly think that when it comes to sex education, rather than just telling people how to avoid getting pregnant or and the ins and outs of things, as it were, they should tell teenagers how to actually do it. There is nothing in place to help you avoid the humiliation of being absolutely shit when you do finally manage to convince a girl to get off with you.
I remember having one absolutely awful lesson where we were shown a silky piece of material and told that we should use it, should we ever wish to perform oral sex on a girl, to prevent STDs. It was like a condom for oral sex and it was the most revolting thing I’ve ever seen. No one said we didn’t have to use it.
In short, sex education taught me nothing about sex. It just left me confused and rather amused that our teacher, Mrs Oddy, had said the words ‘scrotum’ and ‘climax’ all in the same lesson. It was better than maths with Mrs Dilloway, though, I guess.
Thankfully, Rupert and I soon discovered a place where we could learn what we really needed to at that point in our lives. That place was jackinworld.com.
Jackinworld.com was a website that basically taught you how to masturbate in hundreds of different ways. Nobody at school had laptops back then, so Rupert and I used to have to wait until we had access to a computer in his dad’s secretary’s office and swiftly look up as much porn as possible.
We also managed to get hold of our very own porn mag. At the time they were hard to lay your hands on and they cost a fortune. Luckily we found out that Donald Yang (of the shower-curtain expose fame) was something of a porn dealer. I may have had to miss out on dishing out sweets to girls after spending a small fortune on a magazine which only featured older, hairy Chinese women, but it was such a great source of knowledge that it was worth every penny. The only problem was that Rupert ruined the one and only porn mag we had by telling me that the main centrefold could be my Chinese sister. I could never look at Cum Soong in the same light again.
We discovered porn not long after the Millennium. Yes, the anniversary to mark 2000 years since Christ’s birth coincided with my discovery of pornography. At the time Nestlé had brought out a time capsule of chocolate to celebrate. The idea was that after getting a well-deserved sugar high by eating all of the chocolate in one go, you could then put interesting, timely things like photographs, love letters and four-leaf clovers inside the capsule. You were then meant to seal it up and bury it so it could be discovered by people in years to come.
Instead, I used mine as a makeshift sex capsule in which I could keep my porn without it being discovered. I’ve got it to this day, and it’s still got the same magazine in it. It also contains the condom wrapper from the first time I ever had sex. I really should throw it all away at some point.
It seems incredible that nowadays porn is the most looked at thing on the internet, just ahead of Justin Bieber. I’m not sure what that says about today’s society. I guess porn has always been big business, but now it’s much more readily available. Back then we had to take it where we could get it; we’d read the Kama Sutra, but actually my first pornographic experience was my mum’s illustrated copy of The New Joy of Sex.
One day I got an excited call from Rupert to say that he’d somehow managed to stream a porn film through his dad’s computer and onto a VHS. He asked his dad’s secretary to post a copy to me at school, telling her it was a nature documentary. Which it was. Of sorts. I suppose it did include beavers …
When it arrived it had ‘The Blue Planet’ written on the side. The perfect disguise. If ever I went home I took it with me to lessen the risk of any of the teachers discovering its true content, and I kept it in my bedroom along with my other films. Completely safe. Or so I thought.
One day I came home to find that my mum was ill in bed with terrible flu. She was bored so she’d gone into my room to borrow something to watch. She had nearly finished watching one of my movies, and lined up for her viewing pleasure was the ‘Blue Planet’ video. I have never panicked as much in my life. I had to make up some ridiculous excuse and whip it away before she had a chance to insert the tape into the machine and reveal its true contents. I still cringe now when I think about what would have happened had she chosen to watch that first instead of the other film. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
We were allowed to have posters up at school, but nothing in any way rude. I had pictures of Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford that my cousin had given me when he’d left Winchester College. I was over Denise van Outen by then (sorry, Denise!) so supermodels became my crush of choice.
Around this time, I especially liked older women. Not necessarily in a Harry Styles way, but I adored the fact that girls taught me about life in a way that the football-obsessed boys in my year couldn’t.
There was an older woman I fancied around this time, but she was actually someone I knew rather than just a model I had a poster of.
When I used to go and visit my dad in Hayling Island, I would demand he take me to the island’s best fish restaurant, called The Mariner’s. A girl called Nina worked as a waitress, and she was absolutely incredible. She must have been about 18 and was just amazing.
I fancied her so much that she bizarrely became the blueprint for any girl I found
