Alison insisted on meeting up for drinks tonight with this author bloke she’s seeing, Richard. She wanted me to give her my opinion on him. Yes, he’s gorgeous, dark, wirey, intense, but from what she’d told me about his sadistic sexual predilections, not my cup of tea. That’s not strictly true. I mean, he could be my cup of tea, sure, if he wasn’t with Alison.

If you’re wondering what I like I the sack, well, to be honest, I don’t have any particular kink. Sometimes I like to be tied up and used and spanked until my skin is raw and I’m practically out of it, but sometimes I like to just cuddle or whatever. This Richard guy was simmering with passion and a kind of repressed anger which attracted and repulsed me at the same time.

He was going on and on about the political situation in Iraq and how the US had made such a mess over there, and why did no one care about how many Iraqis had died? Was it because they were Muslims? Is that why no one cared? And he kept banging the table for emphasis.

Alison was looking at him, all gaga, like a simpering fool. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that the political situation in Iraq was all very well, but that every time he banged the table, he was making our glasses jump and the liquid slosh over the sides, but I bit my lip. At one point, I asked him if we could talk about something else, like whether Angelina Jolie was pregnant with kid number two or not, but he just glared at me and started a fresh diatribe, this time against Blair.

Once Alison and I had escaped to the toilets, I told her I thought he was a bit intense, but she dismissed my comments, and told me that his bark was worse than his bite and that once you got to know him, he was a great big teddy bear.

Then, unbelievably, he slipped his phone number into my jean pocket while he was giving me a hug goodbye, the jammy bastard. Like I’m going to call him!