There was this chap, when I was a driving instructor, who used to wash the cars. A coloured bloke, I forget his name but he could do a wonderful imitation of Jimmy Saville. Anyway, it was soon after Edward was born and I was feeling low and asked him if he’d got any kids. He said he’d got two with his girlfriend, and his ex-girlfriend had one of his and one of somebody else’s, and he had one in Germany, a little girl he’d never seen. I asked how old she would be now and he had to think for ages.

What I mean is, to say I have an illegitimate son gives the wrong impression. I haven’t put it about much, at all. For one thing, I hadn’t had many girlfriends before I met Eleni. For another, most of them complained that after the first dizzy month or so the whole business seemed to fall off in frequency. They’ve cited (a) I’ve gone to sleep while they were still doing their teeth, (b) I’ve got to a good bit in my book, (c) I’ve stayed up to watch the Election results come in (well, it’s not every day there’s a Labour Government, is it?), and (d) I’ve been going through Exchange and Mart to find a new carburettor and by the time I’ve finished they’d gone to sleep.

Once I confided in a bloke at work. ‘You know what it’s like,’ I said, ‘when you’ve got stuck into Dick Francis.’ And he said: ‘When Frances wants your dick stuck into her.’ This might be crude, but it made me laugh. It’s a little-known fact, but in the case of homo sapiens I’ve come to the conclusion that after adolescence the female of the species becomes steadily more randy than the male. Except for Reg, but he’s hardly human.

I met Lesley back in 1975. Life seemed simpler in the old days. You could see what a girl’s legs were like before you asked her out. Lesley, in fact, was sturdily built but I liked her because she was so interesting. She was my age, thirty, and she’d just given up her secretarial job to study sociology, which people were studying then. I should have seen the danger signs when she went on about women’s liberation, but I was only her driving instructor. She was a terrible driver, and I found this endearing when she was so sure about everything else. In fact she was so dangerous that I feared for my life, and this made us close. At the end of our hour, when we shuddered to a halt, we were both sweating.

She said she was an independent woman and needed to take her life into her own hands. I said: what about my life? She used to quote me bits out of books. Take a restaurant, she would read. Note how it is the woman’s role to listen, to reassure and defer. Yes, I said, and it’s the bloke’s role to pay. She sighed. All my life women seem to have been sighing at me, and nicking my cigarettes.