Half Life

There’s a kind of writing you’ve probably come across online, in which a narrator pretends to be recounting an unpleasant true-life memoir but is transparently indulging a sex fantasy (the salacious adverbs of manner tend to give the game away). I am afraid that the first thing I posted in this new blog might have been interpreted that way by the three people I stupidly invited to read it (one of whom was too disgusted even to manage a comment, while the other two did the polite humouring-a-lunatic thing that I would probably do myself if I had gained the above impression). For what it’s worth, the factual element of that screed was actually true: but in the end it hardly matters whether it was true or not. It was tasteless and indecorous, and that’s what counts, and that’s why I deleted it. It was, if you like, an experiment to find out if there’s a way to circumvent the taboos that limit what we can talk about, or what we can reveal to the world about ourselves. I’m at an age when it...