The sex lives of writers
A fellow writer recently asked me if I would prefer to be famous as a great writer or famous as…
Common knowledge
Why I used to pretend to be working class
I may destroy you
One day in October 1966 I came home from school and found a large man stripped to the waist, attacking…
Written out
How success kills friendships
Looking for trouble
The criminalisation of people-watching
Strip club
Why men of a certain age love to get naked
Excess baggage
It’s no longer just clean eaters who are the health bores
Meat and two veg
My evening at a naked dining club
Help! I don’t know what a cervix is
With all this talk of private parts, the political has now gotten very personal. Recently, I was having an argument…
Lost cause
Being a good Samaritan is harder than it seems
Shrinking feeling
Let’s leave mental health diagnoses to the professionals
War of words
The agony of literary envy
Solitary drinking
Thanks to a combination of night-time curfews, social-distancing rules, pubs closing, restaurants failing, the ‘rule of six’ and compulsory mask-wearing,…
I spent Christmas Day helping the homeless – and I was bored out of my mind
When I told friends that I would be spending Christmas Day helping the homeless at a Crisis at Christmas centre…
OK zoomer, is that really the best you’ve got?
Every generation and teen subculture likes to put the boot into baby boomers like me. I’ve been physically attacked by…
In praise of cultural elitism
At present we have a series of ‘culture wars’ over a wide range of issues — race, gender, sexuality, power…
The dad revolution hasn’t helped our children – or us
When I was growing up in the late 1960s, boys like me craved the admiration and approval of our dads;…
Hands free: I’ve joined a new kind of abstinence movement
Eight years ago, I had an erotic epiphany. It was around midnight: I had sex on the brain and porn…
Charity muggers are no longer on the streets — they’re your friends
There was a time when you couldn’t walk down your local high street and not be set upon by a…
How Eddie Davenport rebranded middle-class swingers parties as ‘posh’ orgies
The English love a story of posh people behaving badly, especially one that involves sex, drugs or drink — preferably…
Are you a politically correct pervert?
It hasn’t always been easy being a progressive-minded man who prides himself on his sensitivity to issues of race, gender,…
Stop calling me ‘a privileged white man’ – I’m more than that
I got some bad news this week. I discovered that I’m a ‘privileged, white male’. It was my agent who…
What do women really want? A man with a beautiful house
Freud famously asked: what do women want? And I think that after two marriages, a dozen long-term relationships and a…
Children are everywhere – and they’re spoiling everything
There was a time when middle-class liberals used to complain that the English were a nation of child haters. They…
