Quite frankly, I began to see King Herod in a wholly different light.
I got home feeling all clucky and sad but I am determined to resist maudlin “I’m barren” mawkishness. The truth is, though, I fear that I am barren and if that isn’t enough to make me mawkish I don’t know what is. I mean, some girls are up the duff straight off. Lucky bitches. Their eggs just seem to be genetically programmed sperm magnets. My friend Roz from college could get pregnant just by phoning her husband at work and if you believe what you read in the papers half the schoolgirls in the country are teenage mums. But some women, I’m afraid, women like me, well forget it. I’m about as fertile as the Lord Chief Eunuch at the Court of the Manchurian Emperor. I couldn’t even grow cress at school. All I ended up with was a mouldy flannel.
However, as I say, I am determined to approach this period of my life positively. Hence these letters to you, Penny, the point of which, according to my friend Sheila (who saw an Oprah on the subject), is that Sam and I become proactively involved in our emotional journeys. We cease to be mere corks bobbing about on the sea of fate and instead become partners with our feelings. Sheila says that according to several American experts whom Oprah spoke to, the desire to have children is entirely natural and good and we should embrace it whether it turns out that we are fertile (I hate that word, it makes me feel like a failed heifer) or not.
Sheila does not have children herself but she understands the desire to nurture them very well, being a theatrical agent.
Dear Book
Another evening, another desperate effort to think of something to write about.
God, I’d love a shag. I really really would like a shag. But we can’t. We’re off sex at the moment and I must say I miss it. Lucy is over there looking saucier than the condiments shelf at Sainsbury’s. The very definition of the word shaggable. Sitting on the bed, wearing nothing but a pyjama top, bare legs raised, tongue pointing out of the side of her mouth, nose wrinkled in concentration. She really is so beautiful sometimes. But I’m not allowed to jump on her. Oh no. Absolutely not. Can’t even pop into the lav and give the old fellah a slap to relieve the tension. We’re saving up my sperm, you see. It’s this month’s theory and it’s one of my least favourite.
Dear Penny
Sam’s rather grumpy at the moment because he’s feeling sexually frustrated. I can’t deny I miss it myself a bit, in fact to be quite frank, as I know I must be with you, Penny, I wish he could give me a bloody good seeing to right now. But no. No, no, NO! We can’t and there’s an end to it. I should explain at this point, Pen, that this is an RBM, a Restricted Bonking Month. What’s happening is that I’m making him save up all his sperm and when the time’s right he’s got to bang me as hard as he can, three times within twenty-four hours. It’s this month’s theory. Wait for the right time and then have one concentrated, day-long, high-density, sperm-rich assault on my ovulating eggs.
But when is the time right? To have it off or not to have it off, that is the question.
When is the optimum ovulatory moment? Some girls say they can feel it when they ovulate, that their bodies send them little messages, but I can’t say mine ever does. All my insides ever tell me is “I’m hungry” and “How about another gin and tonic?”
The only way I can determine the optimum bonking moment is to apply scientific methods of research, which I’ve never been very good at, not even being able to programme my mobile phone. In theory it should all be quite simple. Just a question of counting days, studying your pee and taking your temperature all the time. But it really is a horrible and soul-destroying business. I count days, I collect urine, I pee on a little traffic light from Boots, I take my temperature, I fill in my chart, I do some more pee, I put some more little red dots on my calendar until it’s completely covered in little red dots and crossed-out little red dots so that I don’t know which little red dots are which. It’s like trying to have it off in an intensive care unit.
And the biggest problem of all in these meticulous calculations is when do you begin them? When do you start the counting? Are you supposed to start counting at the beginning of your period, or at the end? Joanna (who’s good with numbers – she does the accounts at the agency) said she thought it was sort of the end of the beginning, not when you first feel your period coming, but when it properly starts. But Melinda (who has actually had a baby) said you count backwards from the next one, which can’t be right, surely? I remember reading in Elle or some such mag that clues can be gleaned from the colour of your menstrual blood. Well, frankly.
I preferred last month’s theory. That one was a cracker. I loved it. We were experimenting with the “bonk all the time” theory. Based on the idea that fertilization is an unknowable, unplannable lottery. Which of course it is.
Lucy made a list in an effort to marshal her thoughts. I reproduce this list below. If nothing else it will fill up a bit of space and make it look like I’ve written more than I have.
Lucy’s Shag All The Time Theory List.
1. No one can ever be sure exactly when ovulation occurs.
2. No one really seems to know at what point during ovulation fertility is at its most likely.
3. If you did know these things it would not make any difference at all. Because no one knows how long it takes a lazy and reluctant sperm with attitude to swim what, I seem to recall being told at school, is the equivalent of a piranha fish swimming the length of the Amazon. Hence, even if you did know when ovulation was going to occur you would not know how long before that you should do the business.
The conclusion that Lucy drew from this list was that the only way to be sure of hitting the mark was to shag all the time. When I say “all the time” I mean once a night which is all the time as far as I’m concerned. If she starts insisting on afternoon delight as well I’ll have to buy some sort of pill off the Internet.
It was a good month, except when Lucy scalded herself. Nothing to do with me, I hasten to add. The problem was that after we’d done it she insisted on propping her bum up with a pillow for half an hour so that my sperm would be able to swim downhill. This is not an ideal position in which to enjoy a cup of tea and so, one day, over her and the duvet it went.
I must say I thought she deserved it. I resented the assumption that my crappy, lazy, undermotivated sperm would only be able to reach her eggs if given the unfair advantage of being allowed to swim downhill.
The other thing I find a bit sad about Restricted Bonking Month is it means that Sam and I don’t really have much physical contact at all at the moment. Sam’s not much of a cuddler, he never has been. He really only tends to cuddle as a sort of pre-sex warm-up, which is a shame. Personally I often crave a bit of physical affection that isn’t sexual and is, well, just affection. Sheila says that in her experience (which is considerable, she having had it off for the Home Counties in her time), non-sexual physical attention isn’t something that men do, and certainly not after about the first year of the relationship. So I might as well forget it or become a lesbian.
Dear Book
First entry for four days. I really must do better or Lucy will think I’m not trying. The whole problem with the theory of writing down your feelings of course is that it takes so long to come up with one. I remember trying to write a diary when I was at school. All I could think of to write was what I’d had for dinner. I’d read somewhere that the cool thing for a guy to record was his sexual conquests, giving them marks out of ten. Well of course I didn’t have any sexual conquests at the time and not for many years after, so that was no good. For a while I tried giving marks for my trips to see Mrs Hand and her five lovely daughters but it was pointless, I always got top score.
Lucy is enjoying doing her writing, of course, surprise surprise. She’s sitting there now, across the bedroom, scribbling away. She gets the bed, obviously. I have to do mine on the dressing table, which is of course completely covered in bottles of moisturizing stuff. How many types of moisturizing stuff does one woman need? I
