I was in the last spasms of an affair with a Dutch girl called Inge. She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn’t blow up beautiful buildings. She knew the Eiffel Tower was a hideous symbol of phallic oppression but when ordered by her commander to detonate the lift so that no-one should unthinkingly scale an erection, her mind filled with young romantics gazing over Paris and opening aerograms that said Je t’aime.

We went to the Louvre to see a Renoir exhibition. Inge wore her guerilla cap and boots in case she should be mistaken for a tourist. She justified her ticket price as ‘political research’. ‘Look at those nudes,’ she said, although I needed no urging. ‘Bodies everywhere, naked, abused, exposed. Do you know how much those models were paid? Hardly the price of a baguette. I should rip the canvases from their frames and go to prison crying “Vive la resistance”.’

Renoir’s nudes are not at all the world’s finest nudes, but even so, when we came to his painting of La Boulangère, Inge wept. She said, ‘I hate it because it moves me.’ I didn’t say that thus are tyrants made, I said, ‘It’s not the painter, it’s the paint. Forget Renoir, hold on to the picture.’

She said, ‘Don’t you know that Renoir claimed he painted with his penis?’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He did. When he died they found nothing between his balls but an old brush.’

‘You’re making it up.’

Am I?

Eventually we resolved Inge’s aesthetic crisis by taking her Semtex to a number of carefully chosen urinals. They were all concrete Nissan huts, absolutely ugly and clearly functionaries of the penis. She said I wasn’t fit to be an assistant in the fight towards a new matriarchy because I had QUALMS. This was a capital offence. Nevertheless, it wasn’t the terrorism that flung us apart, it was the pigeons …

My job was to go into the urinals wearing one of Inge’s stockings over my head. That in itself might not have attracted much attention, men’s toilets are fairly liberal places, but then I had to warn the row of guys that they were in danger of having their balls blown off unless they left at once. A typical occasion would be to find five of them, cocks in hand, staring at the brown-streaked porcelain as though it were the Holy Grail. Why do men like doing everything together? I said (quoting Inge), ‘This urinal is a symbol of patriarchy and must be destroyed.’ Then (in my own voice), ‘My girlfriend has just wired up the Semtex, would you mind finishing off?’

What would you do under the circumstances? Wouldn’t impending castration followed by certain death be enough to cause a normal man to wipe his dick and run for it? They didn’t. Over and over again they didn’t, just flicked the drops contemptuously and swapped tips about the racing. I’m a mild-mannered sort but I don’t like rudeness. On the job I found it helped to carry a gun.