Bag of nerves

When I lived in a bed-sit in Paddington, London, in the early 1970s, when I was twenty something, I encount-ered the most nervous woman I've ever met. I never did find out what was bugging her.

I can't remember how I met Tanya, but one evening she came round to my bed-sit, and from the moment she arrived she was physically trembling. I said she seemed nervous and did she want to tell me why?

She said it was too painful to talk about and she'd rather not say. I tried hard to get her to relax. I thought if she relaxed a bit, she would open up. We had a few cups of coffee, and we chatted, and she told me she was a nurse. She was still trembling, still unwilling to say why, but it was clear she wanted to go to bed with me.

I said I wouldn't feel right having sex when she was plainly very agitated about something. Maybe she thought sex would be somehow reassuring or soothing, but I wasn't happy about it. I felt I would be taking advantage of someone in a state of desperation.

I thought she might try to seduce me by kissing me or taking her clothes off, but she didn't. She accepted my reluctance and eventually said goodnight and left.

I was none the wiser about her extreme nervousness, and still am as I never saw her again. She vanished as mysteriously as we had met.

Sometimes I try to fill in the blanks. Had she been attacked? Raped? Bullied? Humiliated in some way? Deeply shocked by something? Had she witnessed a horrific car crash or a violent death? I'll never know. But something had had a very dramatic, very disturbing effect on her.

Forty years on I'm still puzzled by that lingering question mark of an evening.

Sex symbols

It must be weird when the world sees you as a sex symbol.
Like George Clooney or Scarlett Johansson.
They must know very well they're no sexier than anyone else.
Who knows, they may even find sex utterly boring.
But people see them as some red-hot seducer.
Quite a reputation to live up to.
I'm rather glad I was never seen as anything resembling a sex symbol.
I'm the most ordinary person to look at.
If you saw me as a sex symbol, I'd just laugh like a drain.
I'd assume you needed new glasses.
People never gave me a second glance, even when young and wrinkle-free.
Nobody was ever panting to get me between the sheets.
Thank goodness for that.
I'm happy to be known for other, more essential qualities.
Like kindness or compassion or loyalty.
I'm happy to be the amused onlooker
sipping my glass of wine
as others flaunt their wares and seduce each other
with a shameless appetite.
I'm happy that what I think
is more interesting than what I look like.
Maybe I'm a red-hot, sultry thought symbol.

Musclebound

When I was young, boys everywhere wanted to be like Charles Atlas, the musclebound strongman who supposedly attracted women like bees to a hive.

The adverts posed the question "Why be a seven stone weakling and have sand kicked in your face when you could be a muscular he-man?" All you had to do was follow his special body-building technique and in no time you'd look like Tarzan.

I couldn't for the life of me see why men would want to be so obsessively muscle-packed they looked like some kind of freak of nature, like Michelin Man. I was quite happy to be a seven stone weakling, or pretty close to it. I was alarmingly thin as a boy - and continued to be stick-thin well into my thirties. I had no visible muscles, just a lot of pale flabby flesh.

And as I'd never had sand kicked into my face, except by romping dogs, I didn't see any need for lavish muscular protection. In fact I never had anything kicked in my face as far as I can remember. Except maybe the odd football carelessly aimed my way.

But some boys were seduced by the beguiling adverts playing on their insecurities and their lust for women. I had a schoolfriend who tortured himself daily with his bullworker, anxiously monitoring the strength of his muscles. Sorry to say, after six months they looked much the same as when he began.

How many women are bewitched by rippling muscles anyway? Some maybe, but I suspect kindness and intelligence are probably more appealing. Okay, he can't single-handedly shift the sofa or the washing machine, but is that really a deal-breaker?

So be warned - any rude remarks about my pigeon chest or my weedy biceps and I might have to kick some sand in your direction.

Lust-free

It seems that asexuals, or people with no interest in sex, have a lot of difficulty getting others to accept their disinterest.

In a world preoccupied with sex and finding sexual partners, where the media is awash with scantily clad women and advice on seduction techiques, those who're naturally indifferent to sex are still regarded as oddities - or suffering some sort of psychological problem.

An estimated one per cent of the population are thought to be asexual, and one asexuality website has over 50,000 members. There are plenty of couples who're perfectly happy without any love-making.

Yet whenever they "come out" to other people, sooner or later it'll be suggested that they're not really asexual, that actually there's something else going on.

They haven't found the right person, they're sexually repressed, they've been abused, they're secretly gay, it's a temporary phase, they're late developers. And so on and so on.

But why shouldn't people simply be uninterested in sex? Is that really so strange? It's just one sort of pleasure among a thousand others, and not everyone finds it essential. Life won't come to a grinding halt if a few people don't share the universal obsession.

And obsession it certainly is. Asexuals say they find it extremely tedious listening to workplace conversations that so often revolve around sex and the sexual attractiveness of workmates. They're mystified by the time and effort devoted to the topic.

But in our sex-sodden world, someone who never feels the tug of lust or the frisson of a naked body can be hard to comprehend. What, lacy underwear or rippling biceps do nothing for you? Nothing at all? What's WRONG with you?