This was not what I’d envisaged. Just for one night I no longer wanted to be Julie Andrews and Mary Poppins and Pollyanna all rolled into one big, self-sacrificing ball of niceness. I’d wanted to be Bette Davis in All About Eve, claws out and sequins flying. I’d wanted to be Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons, eating men for breakfast. I’d wanted to be Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl – dark, duplicitous, wicked. I’d wanted to be Scarlett O’Hara, giving zero mint juleps about getting what I wanted, when I wanted it. Spurred on by this impromptu mental pep talk, I tried to arouse him again with my hand. There was a brief spasm of life and he turned towards me eagerly, but then he suddenly pulled another disgusted spinach face and pointed at my stomach. ‘What’s that?’

I followed his gaze to below my navel.

‘Oh, you mean my baby marks? They’re just slight stretch marks from growing two humans in my abdomen.’

Once more the turbo-thrusting twenty-something’s manhood dwindled to a limp shrimp lying on his leg. I was so embarrassed, all I could think about was which South American country I could flee to without a visa at short notice. Even the terry-towelling animals seemed to be looking up at me from the floor with pity. Come on, I rallied myself, you’ve been humiliated by people a lot higher up the food chain than this bit of beefcake. To disguise my mortification I quickly adopted the unfazed facade of a Henry Higgins type, or Henrietta Higgins in this case, briskly explaining about the Bard and island geography and flamenco dancing and how no one could know if a cave was undiscovered, because it was, well, undiscovered . . .

Wayve turned to me with an expression so intense I thought I may have missed my vocation as a high school teacher. I leant in, all the better to hear his appreciative, awed compliments on my intellect and erudition. ‘Yes?’

‘Think I’m gonna puke,’ he said.

I went straight into mum mode – fetching the ice bucket and a towel and placing them by the bed, dissolving aspirin in a glass, applying a cold flannel to his burning forehead. Then I sat by his side, stroking his arm soothingly and chatting away to him like . . . well, like mother and son, really.

I’d soon forgotten about being begotten. Fucklessness is often confused with celibacy, the difference being, of course, that the state of celibacy is voluntary. Yes, I may be a shagless tragic, but being shagless is better than being badly shagged. Isn’t it?

Yep, I thought, tonight I really turned my life around – I used to be insecure and frazzled, and now I’m frazzled and insecure.