The Squeak bares her teeth at me. She’s not smiling; it’s more of a snarl. Not for the first time I notice that she has rather pleasing teeth. They go slightly inwards, like a shark’s. Then I remember that I’m in her bad books.

Yesterday, or was it another day, Mental Sita and I were watching telly in the telly room. The telly room contains nothing but a telly, which is screwed into the wall, a sofa and a plastic chair, both of which are screwed to the floor. Mental Sita is in love with that blond doctor on the reruns of Embarrassing Bodies. She’s obsessed with him. She wants to be in an enclosed white space with him in some city centre, suggestively sharing her psoriasis. We both love that show. No one can be uncheered by other people’s embarrassments. It is a winning formula.

That particular episode involved Blond Doc rummaging around Sharon-from-Hartlepool’s folds of flesh in an elusive search for some vaginal warts. Sharon herself could barely reach her own nether region, let alone see it. Mental Sita and I, however, got an eyeful. And found it mesmerizing for different reasons. Sharon was a hirsute lady, a natural blonde. To me, her vagina resembled some sort of small sleeping creature, a dormouse perhaps, snugly curled up in the cranny of a haystack. Yet there was also something so neglected and lonesome about it that it made me feel a little sad. Not Mental Sita; she was sprawled out on the blue sofa, idly masturbating at the sight of the Doc near a vagina of any sort. I was perched on the plastic chair. I’d been desperate to pee since Sharon had weighed down the trailer, but I was so engrossed by what lay between those head-crushing thighs and Blond Doc’s capable plunging hands, and somewhat lulled into a stupor by Mental Sita’s rhythmic fingers working away, that I was unable to rise from my seat. In fact, I took a leaf out of Mental Sita’s rule-less book – and realized that I no longer had to get up and go to the toilet; I no longer had to behave in any particular way at all. It felt so profoundly relaxing – I try to grab hold of positives wherever I can (my mother is a great advocate of this kind of thinking and I’ve tried to instil that in my own children) – that there on the plastic chair, I let those pelvic floor muscles go.