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Anyway, as I was writing. My biggest fear when stopping at Harrow-on-the-Hill was realized one morning when, as I was sitting alone, about fifteen loud, gum-chewing, hair-twiddling, hoop-earring-wearing girls got on and sat all around me in their green uniforms with shortened skirts and green tights. I was so embarrassed I went bright red, which only served to highlight my skin-tinted Clearasil even more. The loudest of the girls had cheap make-up and her hair was pulled back so tight in her shocking pink scrunchy, it looked like she’d given herself a face-lift. She stared directly at me, I immediately turned to look out of the window. ‘You’re well ugly, intya,’ she said while her friends all cracked up laughing at me bouncing around as the train picked up speed. I would have felt more comfortable playing the National Anthem on my guitar on top of Buckingham Palace at the Queen’s Jubilee.

My confidence was at an all-time low. Even in sexual matters concerning only myself I managed to fail (brace yourself for this). At some time during puberty, boys start to masturbate. Deal with it. If you’re a young boy reading this, thank you for taking the time out of your hectic masturbation schedule to read my book. If you’re an even younger boy, this is all still to come (so to speak), and if you’re a parent, please knock before entering your son’s bedroom. Now, as I have previously mentioned, my parents never discussed any sexual developmental matters with me. I have also mentioned that at Merchant Taylors’ I didn’t really have any close friends. The net result was that I didn’t know what ‘wanking’ was.

I started, due to nature, to get erections. My fellow students would talk endlessly about ‘wanking’. I came to the conclusion that wanking meant to have an erection.

So I was constantly getting erections and doing nothing with them. I thought that I was wanking. My vulgar classmates were often chatting about their own masturbation and borrowing each other’s pornography. ‘I wanked three times last night’, ‘Can I borrow your wank mag?’, that kind of thing. A classmate once pointedly asked me, ‘Do you wank, McIntyre?’

To which I responded, ‘Yeah, all the time,’ thinking he was referring to getting erections, ‘I wake up wanking.’

‘You wake up wanking?’ he said incredulously.

‘Yeah, always. I wanked this morning on the train. I wanked for most of Geography. My mum had people round for dinner last night, and I couldn’t stop myself from wanking the whole way through it,’ came my shocking response.

Of course, the more I didn’t attend to these erections, the more frequent they became, until soon they became permanent. I was walking around with a permanent erection. I telephoned my friend Sam, who now went to Westminster School in central London. Although I was embarrassed, I knew Sam would have some answers.

A few weeks after I discovered masturbation.

This was obviously before the days when all teenagers had a mobile phone, but I was lucky enough to have a phone in my bedroom. Although you wouldn’t know it was a phone because it looked like a Ferrari. There was a shop on Golders Green Road that sold gimmicky phones, and as a family we embraced them. The phone in the hall was a frog, and the phone in my mum’s room was a piano. I should probably update you on the décor in our home and how my mother’s taste was developing in the nineties. The house was very colourful. Pastel colours. Every pastel colour there is, clashing with each other. All the rooms had different-coloured carpets from each other and from the hallways and from the walls that had different colours from each other. It was as if she’d looked at the Dulux colour chart and said, ‘I can’t decide, let’s have all of them.’ So I called Sam on my Ferrari phone.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, Sam,’ I said.

‘No, darling, it’s Sam’s mum. Do you want to speak to Sam?’

‘Yes, please,’ I said.

‘Sam! Telephone!’ I heard her call.

‘Hello?’ said Sam, collecting the phone.

‘Hi, Sam,’ I said.

‘Oh, hi,