Looking back, I can’t say that I got any discrete pleasure out of biting Melpomene’s bum – the taste was an acceptable one, no more, of burning rubber and shredded coconut with a distant tang, I think, of wild limes – but I was pleased that she was pleased. I didn’t want her to feel that she had completely wasted a Monday morning. So I was quite taken aback when, the moment I loosened my jaw to draw breath, she rolled off me sobbing and cursing. ‘You stupid shit,’ I was astonished to hear her say. ‘That bloody hurt!’

I stayed where I was in the wicker chair, dumbfounded, offering nothing in my own defence. She dressed at lightning speed – perhaps hoping still to be at work by nine – taking time only to rub the pain and insult me some more. ‘Not much of a man that’s got to bite a girl,’ was her final summation of my character, as she opened the door and then slammed it on me, giving me the strongest whiff yet of bacon and sausage and fried tomato.

I didn’t move for ten minutes, then I prised myself out of the chair and took a look in the wardrobe mirror. Melpomene was right. I wasn’t much of a man. Where was the sacred terror? Where was the insolent assumption of cruel male will? A little less than half-way up by body my penis was beginning to surface again, was looking around to see if the coast was clear, like the periscope of a cowardly U-boat, unaware that the war was over ages ago. No, I didn’t have what it took to be a Sadist. I lacked the application. I lacked the stamina. I lacked the natural aptitude. Above all I lacked the seriousness of purpose.

Not that this came as any surprise to me. I had always nursed a softer spot – in so far as it came down to an out and out choice – for the Chevalier von Sacher-Masoch. ‘I can only be the anvil or the hammer; I want to be the anvil,’ he had said, and if I had understood him only imperfectly before, after Melpomene I grasped his meaning fully.

So I was relieved to meet Dawn, the ironic shot-putter from Brisbane whose rucksack I offered to carry off the train at Oxford. ‘You must be joking,’ she had said, looking me over and laughing; and she had enjoyed the joke so much that she took me to meet her friends from Surfers’ Paradise who had a holiday squat in Summertown.

‘Meet a friendly Pom I found,’ she announced. ‘His name’s Barney.’

‘What’s Barney short for?’ one of them asked, still marvelling at all things English. ‘Barnold?’

I told them that it wasn’t short for anything; that it was my full name.

They all agreed they couldn’t call me by my full name.

‘What about Banjo?’ Dawn suggested, and nobody demurred.