Dear Alter,

My surname rhymes with queer and is just one letter short of weird.
Surprisingly, this adjective was only sometimes applied to me at school, though weird was frequently used. I was over forty when I discovered that it is an Anglicised Scottish version of Maguire or McGuire (Mag Uídhir), a clan originating in Ulster, whence, like thousands of Northern Irish, many emigrated to Scotland over the centuries. Some of them became Protestant and re-emigrated back to the North of Ireland following the Plantation of Ulster through gifts by the English Crown of expropriated Catholic land to people from the economically-marginal English/Scottish borders. I never liked my truncated surname: it has a mean sound. As pronounced here in France it sounds rather better, even when the W is given its English value. At school I would (of course) have preferred a more urbane, more English name higher up the alphabet.

It was not until my homosensual enlightenment that I got to be able to cope with these two qweered words, and actually embrace them. And so I am happy to be a weird sort of queer - in fact so weird that I loathe the words 'gay' and 'homosexual'. Go figure!

My genital interests continued at the horrible little boys-only private school (with the innocuous name of Cabin Hill) which had plenty of rhododendron bushes in which I could hide with another pupil - a 'brainy' boy who, though just as bad as I at 'games', managed, like several others, to be less noticeably bad than I. He eventually died young as anæsthetist. We were later (at the proper 'public' school for adolescents) to compete in a friendly way for highest marks in biology lessons, but in the rhododendron bushes we played very boyish torture games on each other's penis - much better than the usual boy-fun of torturing animals, which neither of us would have dreamed of doing. This was interesting because he was circumcised (his father was a surgeon) and I was not. So, because my penis was more sensitive than his when unsheathed, he tended to win our torture competitions. As we reached early puberty at ten years old, we discovered ejaculation, which for me at least was always a bit of a let-down. He always won in that competition, because I have always been a very 'late-comer', bizarrely considered a defect by boys and (I suspect) millions of men.

Childhoods are usually more interesting than adulthoods, but we don't often remember much of them...or we invent them (sometimes from other people's flawed memories. Unless we are Gorki or Gosse. I used to play 'houses' in our garden shed with my very sweet friend (from two streets away) Sam Kilpatrick - who embraced homosensuality as a theatre stage-designer in London many years before I stumbled ecstatically into it in Paris.

I have always had an acute sense of arrangement, something like feng shui, so everything in my house is carefully placed among the spider-webs, though nobody would think so. I have an æsthetic sense of symmetry. I also prefer matches all to be pointing the same way in a matchbox! I do not like to see plants in ugly or showy pots. Sam and I used to hang pots and pans taken from the kitchen from the beams of the shed. We must have done something else out there, but I have no recollection. For some reason we did not explore each other's genitals; at that time I was much more interested in what was between the legs of little girls. I still play houses - perfecting the décor in a real house by myself.

It was the ballet that awoke my love of music around the age of six. It was my piano-teacher who almost killed it. The International Ballet, like Donald Wolfit's touring theatre, came to Belfast at the end of their annual tour. This was the only 'high culture' that I experienced outside my bedroom with its wind-up gramophone and a multi-disc 10" shellac set of Grieg's Piano Concerto. How it got to our low-brow house I have no idea. There was also a book of scores of Chopin's Nocturnes permanently in the piano-stool. I still have it, and I am still dyslexic as regards musical scores. I tried once to use it to follow a Pletnev or Kissin performance, but it ruined the experience.

After seeing the ballet I wanted to be a dancer. After seeing Shakespeare I wanted to be an actor. Since I have no idea how to adopt or play a role, so I had only a kind of radio walk-on part in just one edition of BBC Northern Ireland's I Want to be an Actor programme for children, produced by the wife of the elocution teacher who nearly 'cured' my stammer. Being sort-of right-handed and left-footed, I could only have attempted interesting modern dance, like my wonderfully-lithe friend Dennis Greenwood. I have always been (and still am in 2023) limber. I can still climb gates and dry-stone walls. 'Bonobo', my latter-day dance-teacher lover told me that I had a certain grace of movement - but nothing like that of 'Whale', the very large and hairy (apart from his balls) chef-pâtissier Pierre I met in a tasse or vespasienne in Le Havre. He glided, as do many very large men. (One of my portraits of him was bought by an artist in Belfast some years after I moved to France; another one was sold or (more likely) given away much earlier.) I could never have crossed Sam's path again in the Royal Ballet- even if I could have 'stayed the course' for more than three days. Apart from never being a 'joiner', I have always lacked physical stamina. Obligatory cross-country running in the cold and wet at the behest of genital-ogling sadists at 'The Eton of Ulster' was for me - exhausted after half a mile and usually with a stitch in my side - a purgatory.

The process of writing this patchwork-quilt account (many of whose details come from a few diaries I kept in the 1980s) has stirred some dormant memories, created new patches - such as the 'crush' I had on a schoolmate's mother. I used to cycle from school to see her in afternoons when I was supposed to go to my dire and dismal piano lessons. Her son liked playing team 'games', so he did not intrude. Over Earl Grey tea I would expound...on what I do not recall. Perhaps what I had learned in biology lessons. I have a tendency to lecture, and, like many on the autistic spectrum, am useless in debate because of my slow thought-process. Thus I have been a long-term sufferer of the condition known to the French as l'esprit de l'escalier : thinking too late of a bon mot, a riposte or a pertinent question. It is getting worse. I often now say something silly, or am lost for words, especially when I find myself in front of my doctor - very much a throwback to the position of receiving judgement from 'Mr. Greasy' the headmaster. I have always found doctors intimidating. However, one advantage of my increasing deafness is that I can happily avoid all but the briefest conversation.

Mattie used to take me to London (always by boat and train) - whether at Christmas or just after, I can't remember. But I remember staying with her at the Regent Palace Hotel (which I learned recently had a certain reputation), off Piccadilly Circus. She sometimes went to shows in the evening...maybe she met up with a friend, I don't know. But I had great fun running up and down a corridor and playing with a chambermaid! I would have been seven or eight at the time. Unlike many from my background I have never been intimidated by hotels, though I never got the hang of tipping quietly and appropriately.

She took me to see Peter Pan, which utterly transfixed me. And so, like some other little boys, I decided that I could fly. I launched myself off a top rail of a bed and went crashing to the floor. I think that I had to have brief medical attention. On a later visit, we went to The Mousetrap.

One summer, she took me (by boat from Belfast, of course) to the Isle of Man , which I loved. I remember boats on a lake. I think they must have been small pedalos; they couldn't have had motors. I vaguely remember Castletown Castle; I had always loved old stones, especially ruins. They are calming. Hence my entropophilia..

My whole life has been devoted to avoiding the stress of coping with stressful (and probably stressed) people, and my nightly headbanging declined more and more as my schooldays retreated farther and farther into the past - though I have done it at least once in my seventies, and again when I felt miserable from a short bout of Covid in 2022.

Autism and –especially – Asperger's Syndrome (now an outdated term since the cat-o'-nine-tails of Dr Asperger's enthusiastic Nazism and experiments on children has been let out of its bag) have in recent years become well-known and 'interesting'. This is partly due to such books as Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. More recently, the concept of the Autistic Spectrum has gained currency.

I remember my aunt (Marcella) saying: I don't know what we're going to do with you.

I remember my mother (Martha) saying: It's just one thing after another with you.

I have been reading the brilliant Jodi Picoult's House Rules, her investigation of the condition of - and conditions caused by - Asperger's. For the past couple of years I had noticed that I had certain traits described as autistic or aspergerish, and this pretty penetrating novel encouraged me to list and evaluate them - especially since a rather unpleasant brief acquaintance had told me that I had "no empathy".

The myth of the unempathetic autist arises because Aspies seem not to grieve, but remain unaffected by the death of someone close to them. They are 'stony-hearted'.

The above-mentioned neighbour who accused me of having no empathy did so because the evening before I had to "put down" my beloved Belgian shepherd dog, I went to his house for dinner in response to an earlier invitation. He and his wife insisted that I leave the dog in my car (where he was happy and quiet on his own, unlike when he was left alone in the house), and I endured a dinner with a lecturing-hectoring and dominating old man (of my age) who repeated his usual political sermons to me and his mousey, almost wordless wife. I did not mention the next day's appointment with death, and obviously showed no sign that I would be ending my dog's life - at the insistent request of a neighbour whose pet cat he had killed - along with sundry stray kittens and several chickens. She was quite prepared to go to the police, so I reluctantly decided that Astérix would 'have to go', and that I would take responsibility for the murder myself and not go to some cosy and sterile veterinary clinic to have it taken out of my hands. Moreover, I had a stash of Chloroquine in my freezer (just in case my own life became impossible one way or another) so I could test it out on him.

On the afternoon after the invitation to a dreary dinner I followed all the online instructions for death by Chloroquine, which I gave him in his dinner. There was no effect for nearly an hour. Then he was taken for a walk around the ramparts which he enjoyed with his nose as usual. Near the end, he suddenly stopped, stared in front of him for a couple of seconds, and dropped dead. I would call this 'a good death'. He was buried in a beautiful place under beech trees very near where he died and only 300 metres from my home. I often and sadly pass his grave. I still mourn his death and those of my previous, beautiful dogs.

Obviously, it was my calm (almost proud, maybe self-satisfied) account of this the following day which made my neighbour think I had no feelings at all, rather than realising that by taking control of Asterix's death and funeral I was channelling them - in private. Privacy is very important to people on the Autistic Spectrum, and the grief that they feel is very private, and often expressed practically. I am very good in 'major crises', calm and effective -whereas unexpected minor incidents with officals (and security personnel, soldiers, police) can induce an uncontrollable outburst (or 'tantrum'), even in my eightieth year.

In a typical Spergie way I wrote to my neighbour - who, incidentally and I guess falsely claimed that his daughter had been autistic - explaining the situation and recounting to him details of my empathetic life, such as feeling anguish in my gut when I see animals and plants being abused, and devoting many years to the moral, mental and financial support of my sweet friend Malcolm; such as being unable to watch on-screen violence or sex, or refuse a beggar asking for money... My neighbour did not reply, and has not spoken to me since.

People who put on performances of grief at a death are like those supermarket customers who watch all their items pass through the check-out, and only when handed the till-bill (or closure) start rummaging in their bag and their wallets for their card or their cash. My mother and aunt died expectedly, at the end of terminal illnesses. I shed no tears because I was glad that they had been liberated from their suffering and dependence.

Other indications of my position at the less-dramatic end of 'the autistic spectrum' include my difficulty in accepting that other people are not interested in what I am interested in, such as the 'social sciences', art, literature, music, moral philosophy and so on. I am almost addicted to information. I dislike 'entertainment' that does not inform me: thus I have always hated pantomimes and musicals, but greatly appreciate Ibsen, Sophocles and Euripides.

Probably because of my very poor 'theory of mind' it never occurred to me until I was eighty that other people had motives and states of mind that I could neither perceive nor imagine. I also have very poor imagination. After I left the mental imprisonment of school I was pretty frank and open about myself. Though I didn't admit to homosexual activities until I started to enjoy them, I was thenceforward pretty open about them. I offered my opinions too freely to people who were discreet about their own. This was partly because I hate 'small-talk', and partly because of my aspergerish enthusiasm for my own ideas.

I cannot 'talk down to' children. I treat them as equals, like dogs. I am useless at 'small-talk'. In the distant days when I went to alcoholic festivities on New Year's Eve, I tried to find someone to talk to in a corner. I was not a Party Animal - especially since I have disliked drunkenness in myself or others, and have been drunk only three times in my life. II came late to alcohol (because I always disliked fizzy drinks) and came to like it for its taste more than its effect, just as I have liked erotic encounters for their fun and intimacy rather than penetration and ejaculation. I was blessed with a low tolerance of alcohol: a pint (at most) of Guinness, a half-bottle of wine, or a dram of eau-de-vie de marc is quite enough.

Exercise has never made me 'feel good'. It just makes me tired. In my years of searching for megaliths with my mother (and terrible maps before the latest splendid Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland) I exercised often - over hill and down dale. Pleasure came from finding the dolmen or stone circle, not from the exercise. School 'games' and Physical Training in the gym made me feel somewhere between a eunuch at an orgy and a skeleton at a feast.

I think that my horror of kissing men was linked to my horror of make-up (especially on clowns). My rapid conversion to the erotic appreciation of men came about when I discovered the erotic joy of kissing mouths surrounded by hair - and discovered that erotic intimacy could be playful, could be fun. In my ten or so years of cruising (long before cellphones and internet) my most thrilling moments were those of erotic play : wrestling, mutual tugging of beards and scrotums, erotic fun with food. . .

more on beards >

I was 'a bit of a head-banger' (but only in bed, when I would lie on my stomach and bang my head against the backs of my hand while humnming). I have always disliked bright artificial lights and fluorescent tubes;l I have poor tolerance of noise - and for this reason am not too distressed by my increasing deafness. Growing old has for me been a pleasant experience, because I 'feel better in my skin', and, my days of searching for shared intimacy over, am happy between my legs - and in my nipples. My thirty-year non-cohabiting relationship with Malcolm continues with him living in Northern Ireland as an ineluctable British citizen, and me in France as holder of an Irish passport. This has been somewhat inconvenient for him during the Great Pandemic.

Our connection started in a sexual context (through a little group of trichophilous gay men called the Bears' Club UK) and we experienced 'love at first sight' - possibly because we unconsciously recognised shared autistic qualities. Malcolm had been sent to a 'Special' boarding school for 'maladjusted children'. He, too was unemployed. We had a few pleasant writhings together, but his physical awkwardness and passive inability to play meant that these faded in frequency and enjoyment. Each of us found other occasional bearded men, and sometimes we managed very joyous threesomes in both of our homes.

As with many childless and same-sex couples, our relationship blossomed when we got a dog - a border collie lurcher with a perky, curly tail whom we named Oscar. (This name has Irish and Norse roots—Norse Oscar comes from the Old English Osgar, a variation of the Old Norse name Ásgeirr. The Irish form contains the Gaelic elements os, meaning “deer,” and car, “loving.” In Irish legend, Oscar was one of the mightiest warriors of his generation, the son of Ossian and the grandson of Fionn Mac Cumhaill (MacCool).)

Oscar the dog lived and was happy in each of our homes. Because Malcolm (incapable of learning to drive) hitch-hiked everywhere, he and Oscar were well-known in the area and had no difficulty in getting lifts. Dogs love travelling in cars and Oscar was particularly attractive to drivers. By the time Oscar became part of our relationship, I was no longer riding a motorbike, and was driving one old (but safe) car after another until I found one which lasted several years. We survived the horrible circumstances of Oscar's death, which was the last time I wept (and wept).

Elsewhere on this website I may have mentioned my horrible, bloated, wife-beating, publicly-Christian landlord, who hated me but could not legally evict me - after a county court rejected his attempt to do so on the grounds of 'immoral behaviour' which amounted to no more than walking naked in my secluded garden. One fateful Sunday morning, he saw Oscar go on his regular morning howl down the badger-sett just 100 metres from my old, unrenovated farmhouse -The House of the Four M's: mildew, mould, mice and moths.

Unfortunately that morning, I delayed our departure for a romp through the woods, and Oscar trotted off for another howl. Mr Stockdale & son had taken note that Oscar was virtually blind and deaf while howling down a hole, so all they had to do was to go up quietly, pull him out by the tail and bash him to death with the sledge-hammer they were using to drive in new fence-posts close by.

For dogs our world might be like a bewildering film in which they are brave and trapped. The difference between us and all other animals is that our consciousness is intentive, whereas theirs is attentive.
Dogs are trapped by our intention - and by our inattention.

In many places on this earth cruelty to dogs is considered meritorious - and in some dog-meat is considered tastier if the animal is beaten to death as it hangs from a noose.

But in Media (later Persia) the Zoroastrian priests would bring a dog to the bedside of a dying person, to be fed a morsel so that it would lead the deceased across the Bridge of Separation to be judged. The dog was the leader of the soul - the psychopomp - to life after death, and the wild or feral dog was (along with the vultures) the devourer of the exposed corpse's flesh in the wonderful Towers of Silence which Parsis still use.

For the Egyptians with a mortuary practice directly opposite to that of the Zarathustran Medes, Anubis the jackal was the god of embalming - that is to say of preparation for and introduction to the Otherworld. Dogs are psychopomps.

Dogs - particularly those with erect, curly tails - have handsome arseholes, nicely framed by the backs of furry thighs. But beauty is not to be fucked or mucked about with.

Dogs have such simple desires that we in our arrogance despise them. Arrogance is a function of narrative, like most of our feelings. We tell ourselves we are superior, and the telling convinces us. I relate only to beings I perceive as 'underdogs'. I loathe power and authority and those people who have it. As a child I wept in zoos and circuses. I hated the clowns, and begged to be taken home.

Over thirty years later, I was chatted up by a sweet young wino outside a public lavatory in a car-park Downpatrick, county Down. He was about 25 years old and 'in a bad way'. He had just been released from prison for a pathetically-botched burglary, and had not shaved for a few days - which was part of his attractiveness. I took him the 8 km to my house on the back of my nearby motor-bike (a now-classic Honda CX-500 V-Twin) assuring him that I would give him neither cigarettes (whose smell I hate) or alcohol - since 'sex' was what he had hopefully chatted me up for. He shook alarmingly on the pillion.

As soon as I wobblingly got him home I shaved his head to about the length of his burgeoning beard - with some difficulty because he lurched and lolled about and couldn't sit still. We then went to bed and kissed and cuddled and stroked and licked very passionately. He turned out to be born for this activity, or simply desperate for a kind of love he had never known.

It was a fine experience, because most of the people I have picked up are not very beautiful (do not have 'beautiful souls') and are sweaty, horribly deodorised, with sticky, oozy or otherwise-unprepossessing virile members. They are terrified of loving cuddles or affectionate massage, or sensual fun, and know nothing of the subtle communication of kissing. (But then they don't want communication, just guilty and rapid relief.)

But Joe was splendid, and eventually I squirted over his belly, chest and newly-shaven head - and he promptly fell asleep. I felt wonderful, elated, blessed - and got up, went downstairs, cleared up the shorn hair, raked out and lit the fire, and did other useful chores, listening to Chopin Ballades on the radio.

I heard scuffly noises which I thought were the usual mice, but they turned out to be Joe, clad in one of my pullovers and looking quite ravishing in it. He said that he thought the music was gorgeous. He urged me back to bed, where I decided I wanted to photograph him for a reclining-nude painting. But I couldn't find either of my cameras...

Joe had imagined in his semi-dementia that he could secrete two old cameras under his thin jacket while I drove him back to Downpatrick. I found them in the bathroom, and took a series of pictures which I never actually used, despite his winning, quizzical-wino expression.

We had more kisses and cuddles, during which he kept asking me if I would take him to a pub. I kept refusing. Eventually I got him to put his clothes back on, and wobbled him back to Downpatrick - where he asked me for a couple of pounds.

Since he had already removed most of the change from my trouser-pockets, and, I subsequently discovered, a third-full bottle of Armagnac, I could give him only £1.13. Nevertheless, I felt very happy at meeting him, while at the same time sorrowing that alcohol would prevent us from being friends. Alcohol commands all loyalty from its victim, at the expense of everything else.

There are millions of winos in the world. Had Joe not been a wino I would have cultivated him and his cuddly friendship. But had he not been a wino, he would have been almost certainly dull, normal, unattractive and horrified by cuddles and kisses. He would probably have smelled hideously of deodorant and after-shave, and certainly would not have told me in a sweet, desperate way that he loved me. He meant it, of course, in almost the same way that he said in the same breath that he needed a drink. But drink is a jealous god, while cuddles are joyous and free.

Not long after meeting the alcohol-dependent Joe I met another Joe who was a lion-tamer in Fossett's Circus. He had never cuddled (or had erotic contact with) a man, and was very nervous - because he "didn't know what to do", how to "perform". It's so sad that men are assailed also by 'performance-anxiety' - in all walks of life.

He was divorced with three children and had decided that, since he got no pleasure from women, he must be 'homosexual'. Unsuccessful in finding relief or a pal in in a more usual manner, he had written his address on a lavatory wall. When I met him, I simply passed him my phone-number, saying that I did not like cuddles in cubicles. He phoned a couple of days later, and I went to see him.

He turned out to be very cuddly indeed - though I had to keep reassuring him that he was not "doing it all wrong". I insisted that we forget the genital and just hug and kiss and feel good in each other's arms. I was not sure whether or not he was merely 'experimenting' out of a kind of psycho-sexual desperation and loneliness. However, he turned out to be tender and strong, capable of an exciting virile roughness coupled with equally-virile hugs, which I found delightful.

I don't know (can't remember) why we never met again. Maybe he didn't get what he didn't know he wanted from me, though I got much more pleasure than expected from him.

On another occasion I again I picked up a police-abused wino in Downpatrick, a trembling thirty-year-old with what seemed (exhaustingly) like satyriasis. His eyes were like a pleading dog's...and he kept asking, of course, for alcohol and tobacco. Unlike the others, he also kept asking if I had a rope that he could use to hang himself, perhaps hoping that I would buy him a bottle of fortified wine. Taking post-orgasmic pity on him I gave him some whiskey and a joint. He was a bottomless crevasse of yearning and impotence, a much deeper pit than the usual black hole that calls itself an individual and constructs an identity. Yet he noticed and admired my paintings, which gave me more pleasure than the praise of 'normals' (which, on the rare occasion that I hear it, worries me) or arty people, whom I mistrust even more.

We are cruelty and noise. Language is the noise of cruelty, our claim to quell our hellish turmoil. Humankind is falling through the hole it has created in its collective consciousness, elaborately-constructed with metal and stone, and no water.

A few kilometres from the noisy, lorry-laden N1 main road from Madrid to northern Spain, up a rutted track from a rough by-road, my mother and came to the hamlet of Santa Marta del Cerro: a bar, a little shop, a few mud-walled houses and a church. The church is old and battered, and dates mostly from the twelfth century in triumph and celebration of the seizing of the area from the Moors. Past this church, underneath the carved corbels which support the roof of the semicircular apse, cattle with bells around their necks filed early in the morning, to drink in turn at the spring which was the village's water supply. Strangers did not come to Santa Marta del Cerro (= hillock), nobody passed through because it was a dead end. Perhaps still is. It was smaller in 1978 than in the twelfth century. Its church was then known to very few students of 11th and 12th century (Romanesque) sculpture. As with most churches, few people who passed looked up at the corbels high above them - a curious assortment of grotesques:
— a man pulling his beard (beardpuller); a snake with a human head; an acrobat with his feet doubled behind his shoulders; a stork with a snake in its beak; two birds with intertwining necks; figures of ecclesiastics, one of whom has a barrel on his back; a man playing a rebec; a peacock; a leopard; a squatting figure with its hands on its knees; an acrobat with his feet touching his ears; a woman with large, bared breasts, he hands clasped on her belly; a squatting figure of indeterminate sex, and two squatting figures agonisedly displaying their respective male and female gonads.

In 1985 I sat writing at the little oldfashioned local café-bar-cum-corner-shop just at the edge of the touristy part of Besalù in Catalonia which has a well-preserved conjunto medieval including a splendid twelfth-century bridge, and a church with fine Romanesque carvings inside and a west window flanked by two lions, one of which straddles a naked squatting female resembling some Irish sheela-na-gigs, the other clawing the head of a naked, bearded male, cross-legged and holding his willy. We can see this window from where we sit.

There Mattie, my mother, and I sip very good white wine (like a high-quality retsina) and get genuine, free tapas. Sometimes I sit writing by the river Fluvia way below (beyond the allotments and the dumped mattresses) with its gigantic bulrushes (not good shelter in a thunderstorm), its aspens, willows, purple loose-strife, jumping troutlets, cicadas, beautiful pebbles, butterflies, dragonflies, watercress, nightshade, wild fennel, salsify, water-dropwort and several other flowers that I cannot identify.

I am in the middle of one of my periods of torpor. Mattie is puzzled by my sedentary behaviour, for on our Romanesque and megalith trips we dashed from church to megalith and megalith to church all day. One day alone we visited thirteen churches south and east of Bordeaux. On this cheap trip by 'budget' airline we do not hire a car, but use buses.

Ever the cynophile I adopt a beautiful blind dog and give him sustaining food from our dinner-plates. He comes with us down to the river. I photographed him, and from the slide painted his portrait in Ireland. This picture is now in a private collection in Caylus.

A neighbourhood in London, just south of the river, is called Brockley: badger-haunt. I stayed there with a sweet and tubby chap called Carlo - whose parents owned and ran an Italian café. Every year he would trot off to visit family in Salerno. He had escaped the oppressive Italian family, however, only to be ensnared into a relationship with a rich and possessive daddy-persona, who footed the bills for Carlo's compulsive purchases of expensive and entirely unsuitable clothes, and seemed to spend a lot of time in the United States, so Carlo was alone in an over-furnished and flat - with a cat who, I was impressed to see, actually used the porcelain WC. She couldn't flush it, of course, but that is a minor detail.

He called his willy Mr Floppy. We spent a great deal of time laughing. I can't remember the 'sex', if any, but we certainly kissed and cuddled a lot. He was a superb kisser. Here is a portrait of him lying amongst cushions.

Some English homo-intellectuals (notably Auden) had married Jews in the 1930s so that they could legally reside in the UK. I was prevailed upon by a couple of gay friends, born abroad to do the same for a friend of a friend...

My Polish wife worked and worried and was surrounded by a bleak emptiness which terrified me. She is the sort of woman that certain men are drawn to batter and rape - to stop the terror of her emptiness. She was a homophobic, Polish-pope-loving 'economic migrant', trained as an architect - probably of the hideous 'functional', brutalist buildings of the East German type. It was hate at first sight. I should have said No. I cannot say No. One of the people who arranged 'the business' was a very sweet Spanish ex-lover who had escaped a seminary in Francoist Spain and later stole one of my best paintings.

In marrying me she acquired Irish citizenship, which automatically allowed her residence in the UK - where of course I also was resident - if the Home Office were convinced that she was, indeed, married and living with me. I asked for no money for my services, only for 'expenses' which involved several flights from Belfast to London. She also paid for the wedding (and my only visit to a pizza parlour), the Irish passport, the cost of acquiring permanent residence in the UK, and the costs of the divorce which would be sought at the earliest legal moment.

After our mariage blanc in a registry office, attended by the 'gay' crowd who put me up to the procedure, I ran away from her at Victoria Station en route to the British Home Office at Croydon, and boarded a number 39 bus to Battersea Park.

I went through the whole process with her, having a vociferous row with the woman right inside the notorious and hideous Home Office building in Croydon (which probably convinced any onlookers that we were indeed Marriage Material if not genuinely married), where I bizarrely convinced the officer dealing with Janina's application of the genuineness (or merit) of the case simply because I read The Independent newspaper, then only recently established.

In due course (though beyond belief at the time) Poland joined the European Union, thus giving all Poles right of entry and residence in the UK, moving back and forwards as my pious, grasping wife was able to do thanks to me.

The divorce went through easily some two years later, and I have ever since regretted that I did not marry some sweet, vulnerable person of beautiful colour.

Never in my life did I go 'on a date'. I don't think I even was familiar with the term, although I had read some modern American literature: To Kill a Mocking-Bird, The Grapes of Wrath and the Monterey novellas, The Catcher in the Rye... I didn't go to dances (called hops at that time). Some weekends I went with a few friends to a tiny, primitive granite-built cottage on a southern slope of the Mountains of Mourne, close to a flooded quarry which was a marvellous (if dangerous) swimming-pool at the height of summer. Occasionally we went on hikes, and once or twice I went rock-climbing with them. Unfortunately, I was a scrambler rather than a climber. One must never kneel!

I didn't go to parties - except at a New Year's Eve party held by the professor-father of a schoolfriend. I liked being in my attic bedroom, reading or listening to the wireless, often receiving friends. I met my only girlfriend on a live-in holiday job at a student-travellers' hostel in Copenhagen, where I started off as dishwasher, but soon joined other students (mainly Danish, mainly female) at the busy Information desk. This required little Danish, but I quickly picked up the language. Lone was quiet and thoughtful. We didn't go to dances or even eat out. Neither of us had much spending-money. We went to the cinema a few times (memorably to Bergman's The Seventh Seal) and to the beach. With her I heard Nielsen's splendid 4th symphony for the first time at the Tivoli concert hall. We occasionally had dinner with friends, but mostly ate at her mother's, not far from the hostel. We went once on a cycling holiday on a hilly island. It was over a year before she allowed me the first carnal intimacy of my life. I couldn't perform. I have always been a late-comer. But, once I got used to it, I loved the sex. She came to visit me in Belfast. I remember only that I took her in Mattie's car on an excursion along little-used, scenic roads in county Antrim. I think we had separate, adjacent rooms, but I don't remember if one of us bed-hopped. This was several years before Northern Ireland erupted in civil unrest. Belfast was a very dull and dowdy place. I don't remember if we took the train to Dublin - probably not. Besotted, immature and directionless, I can't have been a very exciting or fulfilling boyfriend. Our relationship lasted only three years, when she decided that my best friend would be a far better prospect, and was probably a more exciting. less naive and sentimental lover. She gave me the best orgasms of my life.

About 25 years later, in a little Public Convenience in a park in Bangor, not far to the east of Belfast, where I was checking out some facts for the county Down entries in the last Shell Guide to Ireland (whence St Columbanus sailed to re-Christianise Brittany, Burgundy, Switzerland and northern Italy) for which I was paid handsomely, I once met The Perfect Friend. He was a great talker, with a strong interest in architecture, landscape and townscape, who came from Paisley in southern Scotland, and was visiting his elderly aunt. I brought him home on the motor-bike, and we had a joyous and very exciting time playing role-games and games of ambivalence - such as ths tight squeezing of the balls while tenderly kissing the eyes, very tight hugs which are affection, conquest, submission and reassurance all in one - brother, father, master, victim, playfellow, animal. The burying of a face in a richly-perfumed male perineum is a worship of the masculine, of a person and his sexuality, but his balls are just a cannibalistic bite away. It is such poetic - indeed magical-mystical-ritual overtones that make homosensuality so mind-expanding and fulfilling.

He liked the food that I made, enjoyed the wine. We talked and talked and agreed about many things. We even had coffee and Marc de Bourgogne after dinner, and we concurred that being a daily meat-eater was like being condemned to only having genital, penetrative sex.

But The Perfect Friend from Paisley had a companion who was not to know of his escapade. I find this difficult to handle. If you have a companion, your relationship should be completely open, and adventures 'on the side' joyfully permitted.

I don't understand a single human being. Although I have read a huge number of novels from all over the world, people are inscrutable to me. I am very bad at deception and am incapable of bluff.

Memory is the stories (or memories of stories) we tell ourselves to explain how we find ourselves at present. And meaning, too. Since so much is false or distorted, the truth-obsessed person (in this case myself) allows himself very little memory. And I have very little imagination, anyway.

I am made up of bits and pieces of life left behind by lost memories.

The fearsome-looking male stag-beetle doesn't fight even once in his life. He doesn't even eat. All he does is drag his unwieldy body about, looking for a mate, which he'll inseminate - then die.

As well as Aspergerish* tendencies. I also had bi-polar ones which have only recently been abated by microdoses of psilocybe 'truffles'. They could last for months, then suddenly lift, and I would be full of bounce...for a while. Once, during a low period, I wrote a suicide web-note to Malcolm, which you can read here.

* No – not so much Aspergerish as – a new classification – HSP-ish !

A sudden memory that 'came out of nowhere'. How did it come about that during my last year at school and my first year at University, I was able to invite my former French master, Raoul Larmour to the house and serve him an omelette in my bedroom, not once, but two or three times ? I remember that he always brought a bottle of Monbazillac and his unmarried colleague, 'Monkey' Mark, a cheery and popular teacher of French who had none of the tired bitterness of many of the other teachers, whose nickname came from his chimp-like appearance with delightfully-protruding ears. What did we talk about ? Why did they come ? Raoul was an excellent teacher who awoke in me a love of poetry through Ronsard and de Vigny, which preceded my tardy appreciation of English verse (via Eliot nand Coleridge).

In the same period I joined his subsidised school trips to Paris as a kind of prefect or monitor. These trips always coincided with the Ireland versus France rugby game at the Stade de Colombes, which the school party of maybe fifteen boys had to ritually-attend. Ah! the old Musée Grevin on the boulevard Montmartre not far from our hotel (still in existence) on the rue Geoffroy-Marie and the famous Chartier canteen-restaurant (now re-named and rejuvenated as the Bouillon Chartier) which seemed to serve hundreds at midday...

'Monkey' Mark (I have forgotten his given name) frequently absented himself from the group. Did he have a lady-friend, or maybe a boy-friend ? Did he haunt any of the fascinating vespasiennes, pissotières or tasses which were (in those days before the rise to Catholic puritan power of Madame de Gaulle) on all the main throughfares throughout Paris ? If so, he was very discreet.

It would be thirty years before I entered one in the hope of finding a pal via his penis - and not in Paris, but in the place Danton, le Havre.