Monthly Archives: October 2014

Cock: isn’t it hilarious?

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So this post has been saved on my phone for months now, under the provisional title ‘Hen nights.’ Which is unfair, really: I’ve been on *bad* hen nights, most memorably the one where the Maid of Honour told the bride not to book anywhere for dinner that cost more than £20 a head for dinner because she couldn’t afford it and then proceeded to sneak off during the daytime events and buy herself a Marc Jacobs handbag. But luckily, I’ve not been on any where everything – from the straws to the ice cubes to the shot glasses to the chocolates – has been in the shape of cock.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t hen nights like that out there though. How do I know? Because I’m the girl who ‘likes cock.’ Which means, at the height of wedding season, I’ve come back to my desk to find everything from a little wind-up plastic cock with feet to a crumpled party napkin containing three ‘chocolate’ (I use that term loosely) dicks, with little smiley faces, filled with mint ‘cream’ (geddit?). It’s almost as disappointing as when you’re a kid and you get home from a birthday party to discover that you accidentally sat on your slice of birthday cake in the car, and now it’s all squashed and unappetising.

I was reminded that I wanted to write this post earlier this evening, when I saw this:

I don’t think it’s true any longer to say that women are only allowed to talk about/look at/like cock when it’s presented in a comedy setting. I think it’s now ok to admit that, when you see a guy naked you fancy all of him – not just his arse, his legs or his broad shoulders, but his cock, too, whether it’s hard or not. Personally, I have a weakness for both hard and soft: I love when he’s rock solid before he even gets his jeans off and you can pull his boxers away and watch him spring free, swollen and ready for action, but I’m equally as fond of those moments after sex when he’s soft again, and his cock is damp and mollusc-like. Those moments when he thinks I’m not watching and he cups himself gently in his hand. I think his cock is beautiful.

For all their faults, men don’t seem to try to turn cunts into comedy props. Yes, stag nights are equally guilty of tasteless themes: men squeezed into their girlfriends’ dresses, men with a fake ball and chain around their ankle – but the ‘humour,’ although pretty bloody predictable and childish if you ask me, is not based on how hilarious the female anatomy is. You may well disagree, and feel free to in the comments, but I think we’ve moved on since the 90s and Men Behaving Badly ‘aren’t-tits-hilarious’ style humour.

I fear this post makes me sound like a spoilsport, now I’m nearing the end of it. That wasn’t my intention at all. The point I was trying to make, albeit badly, is that I hate hen night props for two reasons. Firstly, because I think it’s really, really important that we celebrate people’s bodies, whatever their shape and whatever their gender and I think selling plastic, disembodied body parts with little faces for laughs detracts from that, and secondly because I think it reduces women’s conversations about men, their bodies and sex to a superficial and often dishonest, level. I think we need to stop playing sex for laughs, essentially – at least until we can all agree that it’s a happy, healthy thing for adults, both male and female, to be doing.

 

PS I noticed when I was writing this that Horny Geekgirl has also written about cock this evening. You can find her post here.

On sex, cities and food

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I sometimes joke that I could rename the blog ‘Food blog (of sorts) and the title wouldn’t be any less accurate. I don’t blog about food that often, but I tweet about it *a lot*, namely the fact that I exist largely on cake, chocolate, tea and white wine.

For all that I eat badly though, I *love* food. I love eating out, trying new places, revisiting old favourites. And above all those things, I adore food after sex.

It was the boy who introduced me to sex first, eat later – it seemed counter intuitive, since I’d long been under the impression you had to be tanked up to have the confidence to fuck. More often than not, sober fucking meant fucking before dinner, and fucking before dinner meant that by the time we sat down to eat, I was absolutely starving.

So food after sex is bloody good. Being on the prowl for food after sex though is better still. It’s the walk of shame, but the improved version – it’s that same longing for food, often filthy food, that you get when you’ve been drinking. Walk the streets of any city after getting laid and I swear to god that *everything* will smell of food. Curry, chips, hot dogs being fried at the side of the road. Every-fucking-thing.

Recently I took myself to a very good restaurant after sex – a long time favourite. The kind where you have to queue to get in and you sit round the bar and watch the chefs preparing the food. Ok, ok, it was here.

They managed to squish me in because I was on my own – it’s always easier to get seated if you’re alone in a restaurant with very limited covers. Everybody was dressed up for a night out in London. Me? I had a bruise forming on my collarbone, dry lips from my lipstick sealant, and come in my hair. Yes, you read that right. I ate deep fried croquetas, Spanish omelette, tuna and a shitload of garlic. It was a-mazing.

I sometimes wonder if people feel sorry for me when they see me out and about on my own like that on a Saturday night. I wonder if they think I’m lonely. I’m not, not at all. Earlier that same day, I’d walked the full length of Oxford Street, dodging the tourists, cursing the dawdlers. I felt lonely then. But at night? I just don’t.

I’m not a big lover of cities, but I do like the way they change at night – the way the pace both slows and speeds up, the way the crowds thin enough to make your life easier, but not enough to make you feel alone. After I’d finished eating, I walked the couple of miles back to the bus stop, stopping from time to time to gaze longingly into the windows of bookshops that had long since closed for the night or weaving my way around a couple snogging in the middle of the pavement.

I tried to pin down what I was feeling, and for a few moments it escaped me. But that, that being alone in the middle of the city, sated in all possible ways, that feels a lot like happiness.

5 a.m.

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I honestly don’t mind being single. Not in the short-term, at least. It means that on nights like last night, when I go out with friends – one married, one single – I get to be the one saying ‘No, stay a bit longer! Have another cocktail!’ rather than the one who’s thinking that she didn’t mean for drinks that started at five to last for five hours and that, really, her husband will be expecting her home by now. I get to stumble through the door, a little bit drunk, and lie in bed like a starfish, because there’s no one to complain that I’m not on my side or that I have all the duvet. But when I woke up, an hour ago, in that confused way you often do – Do I have to get up for work in a couple of hours? No! Why am I awake: hot, thirsty, bad dream? – I wished there was someone here to fuck me. I still don’t love morning sex but the combination of factors – heavy rain on the skylights, room a little too hot, the beginnings of a hangover pulsing behind my temples – that ensured that I wasn’t just going to roll over and go straight back to sleep also made me really damn horny. I wanted to open the window to let the cool and the smell of the rain in. I wanted things I don’t usually want: someone to pull back the duvet, to kneel between my legs and to lick me lazily until I come. I wanted to straddle him, to let him slide inside me and to ride him until he came with a sleepy grunt. None of this would help, of course, technically. It wouldn’t make the room cooler, or stop the rhythmic beat of rain on the roof. But if I’m going to still be awake an hour later, I’d rather be naked and sweat-soaked, the inside of my thighs slicked with his come.

Carrie Bradshaw knows good sex?

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One Sunday morning last month, the day after my 30th birthday party, I curled up in front of the TV with some of my best friends, hungover and still in my PJs.

We ended up watching Sex and the City, as we usually do when the TV is just on as background distraction. After all, there’s always an episode showing on a Sky channel somewhere.

I’m not anti-SATC, or not anti the TV series at least. The films are a different matter. I came to them later than everyone else, as I usually do with anything that’s fashionable – the series ended in 2004 and I watched the entirety of all 6 seasons in bed in the early hours of the morning in May 2007, when I was revising for my finals. It was light, easy, fun – the exact opposite of studying for uni exams.

Earlier this year, I was approached by the Metro, who wanted to trial me to write sex-themed content for their website. They sent me a sample post title, to see if I could write to house style. My entire career has been focused around writing to house style, but I stalled and stalled until eventually I told them I couldn’t do it.

The title of the post they wanted? ’15 ways SATC improved our sex lives.’

I started brainstorming it. I got as far as ‘Introduced us to the Hitachi Magic Wand,’ and a couple of other points that I can no longer remember and seem to have deleted from my phone, and then I got stuck. I asked friends who are way bigger fans than me. I got a couple more suggestions, but nowhere near the required 15. When I thought about it the show was negative about anal, penis size and friends with benefits, amongst other things.

And then I rewatched an episode. Season 5, Episode 70, to be precise. I was still thinking about those 15 things.

One friend said ‘I don’t like Samantha. It’s offputting how she’s so obsessed with sex.’ Briefly, the sex blogger in me was riled. And then I realised she has a point. The best character in Sex and the City is Miranda: she’s intelligent, interesting and pretty well-rounded. Samantha is ‘the one who likes sex,’ and that allows the writers to be lazy. She’s rarely more complex than that.

Anyway, back to the episode. This is the one in which Miranda joins some kind of slimming club and meets a guy there and Samantha blows the UPS guy. I can’t remember what Carrie or Charlotte’s plot lines are (I rarely can). Carrie walks in on Samantha and the mailman and walks straight back out, horrified. That’s fair enough, I guess: if I walked in on a friend of mine blowing a stranger I’d probably be a little taken aback too. But the fall out, and the judgemental attitude she takes towards Samantha last until the end credits roll.

And then there’s Miranda. Who, having just had a baby, needs to lose weight. Obviously. (This put me in mind of the bit in the film where they have a go at her publicly for not waxing, and made me crosser still.) She meets a nice guy, who goes down on her, super enthusiastically. She comes. And … wait for it … he dares to try and kiss her afterwards without wiping his mouth first.

I’m sure that does squick some people. That’s fine. But wouldn’t a more balanced, a more *sex-positive* approach be to have Miranda discuss this with the girls and to have them give a variety of opinions rather than an overwhelming ‘Urgh. Keep some tissues by the bed!’ and the frankly *hilarious* line: ‘Miranda went out with an overeater and he overate her.’ Oh do fuck off, Carrie, you judgemental bitch.’

Interestingly, when I looked up SATC on Wikipedia, everything in the ‘Awards & Recognition’ section was to do with ‘the wonderful wardrobe from Sex and the City, which taught us that no flower is too big, no skirt too short and no shoe too expensive.’

The sex, meanwhile, comes under fire: ‘Sex and the City [was] specifically recognised for glamori[zing] sex while hardly mentioning its downsides, such as pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.’

Those wouldn’t be the areas I’d choose to pick up on – it’s light entertainment, FFS – but does Carrie Bradshaw know good sex?

Well, if she does she’s having it offscreen.

Why I’m happy to read bad sex writing

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I may be wrong (and correct me if so), but I don’t think there are a huge number of prizes out there for bad writing. There’s this one, but the one that springs most immediately to mind, here in the UK at least, is The Bad Sex Award, whose remit is to ‘draw attention to the crude, badly written, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.’ To be completely fair, it’s ‘not intended to cover pornographic or expressly erotic literature,’ but for the sake of this post I’m going to talk about both erotica and more mainstream fiction.

At the moment, I’m reading Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard, which has a sex scene very early on. I came to it (no double-entendre intended) wary, partly because it was recommended by my boss, and partly because I went to see the author speak about it last Friday night, and she described the sex as ‘a real knee trembler,’ which I found a bit cringy and coy for someone who, actually, can write sex and who, bravely for a mainstream novel, is writing about a woman in her mid-50s having good sex. She writes to her lover, and she says ‘Sex with you is like being eaten by a wolf.’

That line won’t work for everybody. Won’t work for many people, probably. It didn’t make me horny, but it stuck, the way lines from prose I love do, for me. The way ‘It didn’t last, and it wasn’t love, but we had our moments,’ from Anne Raverat’s Signs of Life is still on the tip of my tongue weeks after I read it.

Let’s stick with animal similes/metaphors now we’ve started. In Alison Tyler’s anthology Sudden Sex, there’s a story by Gina Marie called Seasonal Affected Disorder. Kristina Lloyd reviewed that story before I bought the book, and reading that review and what it had to say about the use of the word goat (‘He bites at my neck. “A fucking beast of an animal,” he says, “A horny little fucking beast. An excitable little fainting goat.”‘) was what drove me to Amazon. Not because the goat thing made me wet – it’s generally hard to tell from a few very short extracts in a review whether a story will make you wet or not – but because I thought that as writing goes, it’s fucking brave. And actually, yes, I have wanked to it since, so it does work for me.

Back to the mainstream, and Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters, and this, my favourite bit:

“I did the fellatio thing,” Caitlin said as she and Vix were driving home one night, the rumble of thunder in the distance. “He loved it. It made him crazy.”

“But what about … you know.”

“It wasn’t that bad, if you don’t mind warm gooey laundry detergent.”

It’s definitely *not* traditionally hot sex writing. If Blume wrote it today, I daresay she’s famous enough that it may well make the Bad Sex Award shortlist. As I’ve said many times before though, I like my sex, and my erotica, visceral, and there’s no doubt that it’s that. It even pops into my mind sometimes when I’m giving head (no reflection on the guy I’m fucking or the way he tastes!). I just like it.

I was having a conversation with someone the other day about a erotic novel and asking what they thought about it. “I think the prose is both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness,” was the response, and I understand that to mean that the author takes risks with language, and, as a result, every so often misses the mark. That’s fine, on two counts: firstly, I think what works for the individual in erotica is deeply, deeply personal, so what works for one person is almost certain to leave another cold. Secondly, I would far, *far* read something that took risks and sometimes got it wrong than something which played it super safe and left me feeling meh.

I really, really wanted to end this by giving examples from the Bad Sex Award Shortlist that I think work better/are hotter than the judges are implying. Sadly, I do think that most of the ones in the Guardian article that I linked to at the top of this post are pretty awful. But I don’t think that changes the fundamental point. And, if you have examples of unusual/’bad’ sex scenes in literature that do it for you, please, *please* leave them in the comments.

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Time is a feminist issue

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I’ll begin this by saying that I think a lot of people may disagree with what I’m about to say. Certainly the friend I mentioned it to this evening did. Please do add your thoughts in the comments, whether you agree or not – I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts.

Anyway. In comparison with a lot of women, there are very few claims on my time. I work full-time, sure, and there are a couple of hobby-related regular commitments in the evening, but I’m not raising children, working hours and hours of overtime or caring for someone who’s sick or elderly. I’m a single woman, a free agent, and my diary is relatively uncluttered.

None of that means that my time isn’t valuable. There are lots of things I need/like to do when I have free time – meet friends for drinks, laundry, food shopping, blogging, writing. And I like to know in advance where those things are going to slot into my week. That makes me neither a better nor a worse person than someone who likes to fly a bit more by the seat of their pants.

I should also, in the interests of full disclosure, remind you that time keeping is not one of my strengths. I’m regularly 15-30 minutes late. I’m occasionally guilty of doing that thing where you send a ‘Just leaving now!’ text when you still have wet hair and are wearing only your knickers.

But I don’t bail. Last night I went to someone’s birthday drinks. She’d invited somewhere between 15-20 people. Most had replied to say that they’d be there, but when I turned up, halfway through, the majority had texted some excuse as to why they had to cancel at short notice. This kind of shit drives me crazy. As she said herself, if people had said no in the first place, or the week before, she could have made the decision to cancel. The way it actually worked out, as the night wore on the pub kept moving us to smaller and smaller tables as it became obvious people weren’t going to show. I doubt it ruined her birthday, but it can’t exactly have made it, either.

So yes, both men and women can be lame. But in my experience it’s far more often men who are guilty of suggesting plans, promising to confirm by a certain time/day, and then not bothering, so the woman has to chase, which makes her feel needy, naggy and generally pretty damn unattractive. Once or twice I’ll forgive this, but if it becomes a pattern, not so much. If it becomes a pattern I will nag you, I will become shrill and needy, and I will pick a fight, even though it won’t help.

Why a feminist issue, though? Well. You could (and I’m going to) argue that men call the shots much more in dating than women do, especially in the early days. I see tweets every day from women about men who’ve arranged dates only to cancel at the last minute. And, something which I’ve had more experience of myself, and which I hate even more: men who initiate conversations via dating websites, who want to flirt, who want to sext, who want you to give up a good chunk of your time to interact with them online but who have no intention of meeting up in person, Men who can’t even be bothered to take the time to draft something new when they message you via said sites. Men who clearly haven’t even taken the time to read your profile. Men who, essentially, think their time is *much* more important than yours.

That’s the impression it gives too when, a bit further down the line, a guy suggests meeting up on a Sunday and says he’ll confirm by, let’s say, Friday evening. I generally like to have my weekend plans firmly in place by Friday, but I like him, so, ok, I can wait till Friday. Friday comes and goes. Nothing. Saturday evening comes. Still no word. I text, and ok, by now I probably sound a bit stroppy. I say something like ‘I guess tomorrow’s not happening, then? And the reply, of course, says ‘Sorry! No, couldn’t make tomorrow in the end.’

There are of course other explanations here. That he’s generally flaky. That he just doesn’t give a fuck about me. There’s probably some truth in both of those statements. But I do think it’s partly because he’s a man, and because he’s been socialised to believe that his time, his wants and his needs, take precedence. And even if he doesn’t believe those things, he has *no idea* how often women’s time is at the mercy of the decisions men make. So boys, if you really want to be feminist, start by texting when you say you will.

On growing out of kink

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I haven’t bought my Eroticon 2015 tickets yet. There are a few reasons for that: better to wait until payday, fear of a repeat of last year’s anxiety attack, and, most worrying of all, the ‘hope’ that I’ll be in a relationship that means erotica/sex blogging/kink will no longer be a part of my life.

I use ‘hope’ in the loosest possible sense. I’m not actively looking for a relationship in which I’m unable to express my submissive desires. It’s just that, well, finding decent guys on dating websites is hard enough, so inevitably, there are things on my wish-list I’ve decided I’ll compromise on if I have to. And finding a partner who’s at least a little bit dominant may be one of those things.

And yet. One of the most frustrating conversations I’ve had in recent weeks was with my best friend, who I adore. She’s got through her fair share of unsuitable men over the years, but she’s had some great sex with these men. Recently, she’s started dating a nice guy, but, in her words ‘It won’t last if the sex doesn’t improve.’

Ok, so for her, sex is a priority. Great. All the more frustrating then when, over brunch, I was talking about how it’s only in the last year or so that I’ve really started to embrace submission and how fantastic it would be if I met someone who I not only liked and fancied, but who also shared my kinks, and she said ‘Oh, but that wouldn’t really matter if you met the right person.’

FFS.

I feel like, in a way, I’ve come reluctantly to kink. In the past month two people, completely independently, have pulled me up on my claim to be vanilla, citing my increasing desire for pain, bruising and toys as proof that it’s simply not true. Not to mention increased participation in things like Sinful Sunday. Not only are they right, I’m also having the time of my life, sexually: I’ve discovered what turns me on, I have a sexual partner who’s happy to explore that further with me, and I am *loving* it.

I’ve written before about submission and self-confidence, and unlike Girlonthenet, I still think there can be a link between low self esteem and submission. I think it tends to be a more passive kind of submission – a letting someone else take charge so you don’t make any false moves, rather than purely because it turns you on – but I’d argue that it’s submission nonetheless.

Novels like Fifty Shades of Grey would have us believe that the only reasons you could possibly be interested in BDSM are a) difficult childhood b) trying to hold onto a billionaire who had a difficult childhood. They also promote a very fixed view of what BDSM means: it’s spanking, flogging, bondage, waiting on your knees for your Dom to turn up.

It can be any or all of those things. It can also be none of them. Girlonthenet wrote a wonderful piece a while back about being a ‘stroppy submissive’ and I associate with it more and more. When the boy grabs my wrists and forces them high above my head I don’t submit willingly: I try to wriggle free, desperate to get my hands on his belt, to suck his cock, to touch him. I let him slam them back against the wall, my rings clinking as they hit the plasterboard, and I beg him to let me have his cock in my mouth. When he refuses I don’t look at the floor while my inner goddess pirouettes with joy, I tilt my chin up and look him square in the eye. I’m as defiant in submission as I am outside of the bedroom.

I’d love to find a long-term partner who loved all those things about me and who wanted to embrace them within our relationship. Even before I started exploring my submissive side, sex was a key interest: I’ve been writing erotica for years and years. Not buying an Eroticon ticket for 2015 because I’d met someone who didn’t like that side of me would be a massive let down, really. It would mean I’d compromised massively on who I am. But would I put kink to one side if someone was perfect in every other way? Quite possibly, yes.

If I do though, it’ll be because I choose to compromise. It sure as hell won’t be because I ‘grew out of’ kink.

Wicked Wednesday: on snatched sex

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One of the best things about sex is being able to take your time over it. Sex that’s made up of endless changes of position, long, languorous bouts of kissing, thrusts that slow to almost nothing before building back up to a frantic rhythm.

But I’m a sucker too for last minute decision sex, sex that’s planned ahead but that has to fit neatly into the slot assigned to it. Sex that’s tight on time, but heavy on sensation.

Last minute decision sex can obviously happen within seconds of the decision being made, but I like it when you have to work at it a bit, when you have to travel a bit further than is strictly reasonable, when you can barely justify it to yourself, let alone other people.

It reminds me a bit of Christmas: it’s ostensibly all about the day itself, but actually everyone knows that the real joy is in the run up and the day after. It’s about how wide my pupils are as I hurriedly brush on mascara in the car’s rearview mirror, about the way my Chanel No. 5 smells when it hasn’t yet had time to mellow on my skin, the way you can lose yourself in the crowd in a busy London pub, the way that first sip of red tastes …

The way he tastes …

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Hey, clumsy people: stick to missionary

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There’s no denying it, this post is a rant. So, I’ll try to keep it short. After all, I’m blogging every day at the moment, so it’s not as if there won’t be more words tomorrow. I’ll try and make those words a bit cheerier than these, too.

Those of you who read regularly might well remember Hannah Gale-gate – Hannah wrote a blog post for the Metro where she lovingly listed the ’21 Unsexiest Things About Sex.’

Cosmo, I think, has now gone a step further with this. It started pretty well – I clicked on a post called ’12 sex things men really don’t give a crap about.’ But the universe insists that each and every sex-positive list post must be balanced by a sex-negative one, so, when I foolishly looked at the sidebar of ‘clearly Cosmo has absolutely no fucking shame at all,’ I was lured into clicking on this bullshit.

I could have written this post from a ‘oh great, another article that makes me feel shit about having a physical disability’ angle. But you know what? I’m not going to. I don’t think clumsiness, or even perceived clumsiness, is the preserve of those who aren’t able-bodied. I’ve lost track of the number of women who’ve commented or tweeted since I started this blog to say that they too can’t wear heels, and that they wish they could, even though they’re, guess what, able-bodied.

People are clumsy, no doubt about it. They smash mugs with alarming frequency, they trip over invisible objects, they get their hair caught in the zip of their dress. But it’s not special: *everybody* does those things at some point in their life. It doesn’t FUCKING MATTER.

Yes, I’m angry. I’m angry because I think this perceived lack of grace affects women in a number of different aspects of life – sex and sport being the two that spring most quickly to mind. But mostly I’m angry because that post was written by ‘Anonymous Cosmo staffer.’ You want to write this kind of lame bullshit? Fine. But have the guts to fucking *own* it.

So there’s this bar…

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So pretty close to where I live, there’s this wine bar. Which was where I first met the boy.

About a year later, he texted, mid-morning: ‘Did you know the wine bar’s closing?’

I didn’t. I went, not with him, but with a friend, for one last glass after work. I was feeling sentimental.

It takes me a long time to settle in places. Just as I’m beginning to get comfy somewhere, people start to suggest that maybe, for the sake of my career, my desire to have children, for *some reason,* it might be best to move on. And often, I act on that suggestion.

That bar was just a bar. But when I rocked up there to meet the boy for the very first time, it was pretty much my only haunt. I’d been living in the city less than 4 months. I’d made a couple of friends at work, and my best uni friend lived nearby, but nothing felt like home yet.

We met, or went for post-sex drinks there, often, in the early days. And inevitably, I began to associate it with him. It was where I’d tried to decide if I even fancied him. It was where we’d gone together to a wine tasting on our second date and chatted politely to a lot of middle-class, middle-aged men while his hand slid further and further up my thigh…

The night it closed, he rocked up too, eventually. Friend and I left. He texted:

‘Hey, where’d you go?’

I went back. Obviously.

They’d said they would close at eleven or when the wine ran out, whichever came sooner. The wine got progressively worse, but it didn’t dry up. It turned into a lock in. We were both slaughtered.

When they turfed us out in the early hours, I was desperate to have him inside me. We snogged in the street and eventually ducked between a restaurant and an office block. I was wearing jeans, which was my worst decision of the evening, even worse than buying a third bottle. I knelt in the shadows and sucked his cock, and then we tried, pretty unsuccessfully, to fuck against the wall. It wasn’t the best sex we’ve ever had, in fact, it would probably be up there with the worst. If I could remember the details, that is. But it didn’t stop me thinking about it every time I walked past. *Still* thinking about it every time I walk past, for that matter.

And the bar? It reopened six months or so later, under new ownership. I don’t go there much anymore. It’s not the same as it used to be: it’s poncier, all cream paintwork and yummy mummies.

I’m glad it’s still there in one form or another, though. Because, y’know, memories…