How can something so gossamer thin protect me? Something which snags on nails, rough chairs (I laddered my tights at my Cambridge interview) or runs for no reason at all?

I don’t know. But I bought my first suspender belt at 18: precocious as fuck, because I never did learn how to take less than half an hour to wrestle to attach my stockings to it. And wearing your knickers *on top.* They don’t tell you about that, do they?

So I graduated to hold ups. M&S basic, £6 a time hold ups. Just as sexy, right? And I realised that, if I can avoid it, I don’t take them off during sex. I thought I was just ‘being sexy.’ It took me a while to realise that I have an uneasy relationship with the way my legs look: if I sit naked on the floor, with them stretched out in front of me, you can see how there’s barely any muscle tone in my left thigh compared to my right. I can hide that a bit behind a 15 denier thread count.

If you’re going to take them off me, therefore, there had better be a damn good reason. I fucked a guy a while back who tried to roll them off seductively and then just dropped them on the floor.

I felt vulnerable. And if you’re going to use my hosiery to make me feel vulnerable it’d better be because you’ve used it to tie my wrists to the bed…