At present to enter a virtual world you would have to put on a crude-looking diving helmet of the kind people used to wear in the 1940s and a special glove rather like a heavy gardening gauntlet. Thus equipped you would be inside a 360° television set with a three-dimensional programme, three-dimensional sound, and solid objects that you could pick up and move around. No longer would you be watching a film from a fixed perspective, this is a film-set you can explore, even alter if you don’t like it. As far as your senses can tell you are in a real world. The fact that you are in a diving helmet wearing a gardening glove won’t matter.

In a little while, the equipment will be replaced by a room that you can walk into like any other. Except that it will be an intelligent space. The room will be a wall-to-wall virtual world of your choosing. If you like, you may live in a computer-created world all day and all night. You will be able to try out a Virtual life with a Virtual lover. You can go into your Virtual house and do Virtual housework, add a baby or two, even find out if you’d rather be gay. Or single. Or straight. Why hesitate when you could simulate?

And sex? Certainly. Teledildonics is the word. You will be able to plug in your telepresence to the billion-bundle network of fibre optics criss-crossing the world and join your partner in Virtuality. Your real selves will be wearing body suits made up of thousands of tiny tactile detectors per square inch. Courtesy of the fibreoptic network these will receive and transmit touch. The Virtual epidermis will be as sensitive as your own outer layer of skin.

For myself, unreconstructed as I am, I’d rather hold you in my arms and walk through the damp of a real English meadow in real English rain. I’d rather travel across the world to have you with me than lie at home dialling your telepresence. The scientists say I can choose but how much choice have I over their other inventions? My life is not my own, shortly I shall have to haggle over my reality. Luddite? No, I don’t want to smash the machines but neither do I want the machines to smash me.

August. The street like a hotplate cooking us. Louise had brought me to Oxford to get away from Elgin. She didn’t tell me what had happened in the previous three days, she kept her secret like a war-time agent. She was smiling, calm, the perfect undercover girl. I didn’t trust her. I believed she was about to break it off with me, that she had made it up with Elgin and begged this Roman holiday as a way out with a frisson of regret. My chest was full of stones.

We walked, swam in the river, read back to back as lovers do. Talked all the time about everything except ourselves. We were in a Virtual world where the only taboo was real life. But in a true Virtual world I could have gently picked up Elgin and dropped him for ever from the frame. I saw him from the corner of my eye waiting waiting. Elgin squatted over life until it moved.