Sex

Late spring. Sitting in the armchair in the living room, I was chilly and disconsolate. My middle daughter was seven-and-a-half months pregnant and unwell. The pregnancy had triggered two serious autoimmune disorders. She’d been successfully treated for thyroid cancer a few years before, but this new disease was attacking her lower spine; she was exhausted and in almost constant pain. At times she couldn’t pick up her two-year-old daughter. I could barely afford to fill up the car, never mind pay for parking and a flight back to England, and every night lay awake worrying. Beside the chair to the left, a live rock wall, and in front, a wood-burner.

Four of us go for lunch once a month. My hippy ceramist neighbour, Geoffrey, is a foodie and one of the best cooks I know. He was born a few years after the second world war and, along with his brother, who went on to become a Michelin-starred chef, developed an interest in food from his English, Belgian and Italian grandparents and Swiss mother. I couldn’t afford to heat the little painting studio downstairs this winter and have only sold one work since November, so our choice of restaurants has been necessarily modest.

The porn star Bonnie Blue offers a straightforward explanation for her decision to join OnlyFans. She was in her early twenties, married to her teenage sweetheart, pursuing a career in recruitment and living in Derbyshire, the county of her birth. As she told an interviewer last year: ‘I used to work an office job, nine to five, sit in rush hour, get given 20 days’ annual leave. And for a while I’d accepted that. I was like “OK, this is what life is. This is as good as it can get.”’ But Blue (whose real name is Tia Billinger) wondered if life might not have more to offer her.

When I left university, I prepared for a short spell of poverty while I sent off amusing and opinionated articles to newspaper editors who needed the work of smart alecks like me to entertain their readers. My short spell of poverty lasted 17 years. In the meantime, I survived on odd jobs, including a stint as a life model. ‘Starts at ten,’ said Piers, a friend who taught at a college in Kensington. Before my shift, I flipped through Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art in case a life model was expected to know the classical poses by heart. I imagined Piers starting me off with an easy one: ‘The Thinker’ by Rodin, or ‘Moses’ by Michelangelo, or ‘The Martyrdom of St Sebastian’ by Mantegna.

Two years ago, at five to eight in the evening of Monday 22 May 2023, I ran into the department store Galeries Lafayette at CAP 3000 next to Nice airport, grabbed two black blazers and rushed to the nearest checkout. ‘Je suis vraiment désolé, Madame, mais nous fermons.’ ‘Please, it’s not eight o’clock yet. My husband died yesterday morning – I need a smart jacket for the funeral on Friday. There are no shops where I live.’ Shaking and fighting back tears, I tried on both in front of the two assistants at the till. ‘Quelle?’ They agreed on the first, and with no mirror close by I took their word for it and paid. I was on the way to pick up my youngest daughter.

To be honest, I felt relief when Pope Francis died. This had nothing much to do with his regular assertion, in contradiction of Catholic doctrine, that all war is unjust. Or his view that Ukraine should have ‘the courage to raise the white flag’ to stop more futile bloodshed which ironically is (more or less) Donald Trump’s view. Or his suggestion that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza. Or his more-the-merrier view on illegal immigrants. No. The cause turned not on politics but on the heart. However absurdly, I had come to see the Holy Father as a love rival. My wife Carla, a devout Catholic, was besotted with him. ‘How I love him!’ she used to say.

When I turned 70 in September, I had a panic attack. I was certain that my romantic life was over. I’d finally crossed over from middle-age into old age and had joined that sad tribe of the unshaggable. My time as a fun-loving lothario was at an end. Goodbye hot wild monkey sex – hello hot cocoa. These days, thanks to my chronic arthritis of the knee, I can’t raise my leg, much less get it over Concerned female friends told me I was guilty – once again – of premature self-pity. They assured me that there was sex – and plenty of it – after 70. And just as smokers and boozers love to tell the story of the aunt or uncle who smoked and drank all the time and still lived till 100, so friends told me the story of some aunt or uncle who was still having affairs at 85.

‘Sorry sir, the rules clearly state that all single men must be accompanied by a woman.’ As the frustrated guest is ushered off the premises, my female companion and I are welcomed into a grand reception room where the organised sex party is being held. A barmaid offers us some complimentary condoms and a handful of Quality Street, along with some fluorescent orange punch served in plastic cups. Should we be engaging in small talk or ripping each other’s clothes off? No one seems to know The organisers of tonight’s paid event claim they cater for the world’s ‘sexual elite’ but there’s something disarmingly ordinary about the snaggle-toothed mid-lifers trooping in behind us – hardly the glamour models I’d been expecting.