SEX NOT

Loyal readers. You’ve been with me since January, less than a month after my fall. I had no idea then that people would be at all interested in my continuing degradation, but we have grown to sixteen-thousand subscribers, which is phenomenal and very moving.

I like my writing to be freely available, which why my dispatches are for everyone. But paying subscribers must get value too, so in the coming weeks I plan to:

1.     Send Out Books: finally, I will be sending out signed copies of my books to Founding Members.

2.     Ask Me Anything: a post in which you can ask me questions in the comments and I will endeavour to reply to as many as I can.

3.     Material From My Back Catalogue: more material from my back catalogue.

As always, if you have the means, it’d mean a great deal if you could support my writing by becoming a paid subscriber, and keep this show on the road.

In hospital, one of things that is never mentioned, and there really is no reason for it to be, is sex. There are no jokes, double entendres, or exchanged looks. The place is antiseptic in all senses. Of the many losses I have suffered due to this accident and injury, sexual feeling might be the least of it. A friend of mine who had prostate cancer, and after his recovery could never have sex again, said, ‘Thank God I’m alive, and everyday I’m glad to be. That’s enough.’

Losing one’s sexuality overnight, in a sudden blow, is like losing a sense. Something that has guided and activated one throughout one’s life is unexpectedly missing. To have no erections, to feel no sexual excitement nor have any fantasies, is to be deprived of an orientating engine that has steered, bedevilled and pursued one since adolescence. It is a major absence, and a puzzling one. I now look at sexuality from another point of view, that of a disinterested spectator. I wonder what all the fuss is about, and why people are risking their reputations for the sake of what seems to me now to be an unimportant, if not minor, excitement. It doesn’t follow that I feel no enthusiasm anymore; I do, just not for that. I wonder where it has gone.