Don't Get Weird On Me, Baby

“Which is your favourite Lloyd Cole song?” The Farmer's Boys were playing in the background, but it couldn’t be the Eighties because we have children and jobs and mortgages and directorships and teams of staff and all sorts of things that seemed inconceivable in those days. It was one of the rare sunny afternoons in London when for a moment you feel as if you are on holiday Conversations like this are important in their small way. A question like that is a short cut to a sweeping swathe of common ground, a history written in music where we listened to the same songs and maybe on the same day, in different cities or, who knows, on Blackheath in the same pub.

He went for Perfect Skin. I’d have guessed that. Not because it was the main hit, but because he was in love with the girl in the song. All the indie boys wanted this girl, and we all wanted to be her. We might not have had perfect skin, it was our late teens after all, but hell we could be sexually enlightened by Cosmopolitan. I confused desire with enjoyment, at that time. I so wanted to be liberated and bold and free, and I so wanted to be turned on. I was a raging torrent of longing, frustration and hormones: and the boy to girl ratio was 12:1 in my college, 3:1 more widely in the university. No shortage of prospective playmates then.

I would start enthusiastically, give and ye shall receive, right? But it didn’t work like that, for all the good manners and fine breeding of these boys. It took me a long while to realise that, feminist or not, it’s only sensible - in the bedroom at least - to follow the principle of Ladies First. Despite my best attempts (and there were a fair few) my university years were orgasm-free, or at least when anyone else was present. I had a pretty good handle on the mechanics of boy-meets-girl but that isn’t the important thing, is it?

My theory now, for good sex from an early age, would be to get trained by a more experienced partner. Two young people trying to work it out as they go along might never get there. I bet there are a lot of couples like this, feeling deep down that they never quite got the hang of it, that other people in films and books and on tv, and in real life too, are having much better sex than they are.

I’d also recommend lessons not just in how to do sex, proper lustful, unembarrassed sex, but in how to talk about it. How can you ask for what you want, say what you like, give instructions or beg, if you don’t know the words? This is a barrier too: so many people who can do it, but couldn’t discuss it to save their lives. Or their marriages, for that matter.

Some people did have the advantage of a misspent youth and joyfully, eagerly, learned this stuff early on. But the kind of girl that would teach you these things is not necessarily the person you would take home to meet your parents, the kind of person you imagined marrying, being a mother to your children. That’s a role for Nice Girls. And Nice Girls don’t want to do that dirty stuff, hear those filthy words or - god forbid - say them. Do they? Or Nice Boys either. And it’s nigh on impossible to introduce these things later, I’d imagine.

My favourite Lloyd Cole song is Rattlesnakes. The girl in that song gets to look cool alright, doesn’t she? And read great books and carry a gun. Her heart’s like crazy paving (oh great lyric) and there are all sorts of things she needs.

Me too, me too....