Once upon a time, before the world-wide web and zombi-phones, a young deodorised man in pastel-coloured clothes called Alan drove 60 miles through northern Irish counties Tyrone, Antrim and Down just to suck my over-sensitive 50-year-old cock - which he did unusually well, as I noted in my diary. I remember nothing of this, nor of most of my sexual encounters with men, which (and who) quickly merged with my memory-fog - in which initial good feelings are blotted out by later disappointment. I hope he thought that the 120 mile drive was worth it. He didn't stay for dinner, let alone bed and breakfast. I never heard from him again.

There have been several Alans in my life, most of them queer, one of them ex-anorectic as well. Álainn means 'handsome' in Irish.

Another once upon a time, once only, this time in London, a handsome hairy, bearded Turk called Alim pleaded with me to pass my small hand and half my scrawny arm through his arse-hole and up his rectum into his colon. This was another bizarre experience - especially for someone who likes neither arse-holes nor sodomy. I guess I felt sorry for him. Such is complaisance. Maybe my mother felt sorry for my father.

There was the priest of St-Eustache, formerly the Markets church in Paris, who was famous for being a torn-denim freak, and the lawyer in Pisa who could only achieve orgasm if his balls were being beaten by an erect (or semi-erect) cock.

Then there is The Missing Year.

Before my eightieth year I hadn't thought about it. Most of my life is a blank with foggy bits, so it never occurred to me to wonder where I was between my birth and my adoption. I reckon there is no way to find out. The curious thing is how incurious I have always been about my early life. I asked my mother only twice about my father. The first time, I was maybe 10 years old, and was easily fobbed off and diverted.

The second time was just before discovering officially that my 'aunt' was actually my mother, and just after happily declaring myself, at the age of forty, to be an enthusiastic homosexual to all and sundry, including my newly-identified mother and her shocked sister. They both 'got over it' quite quickly : it was just another in a long line of disappointing events since the age of eight, including three months in Belfast prison for shoplifting food.

My mother was not forthcoming this second time, either, but I gathered that she 'was taken advantage of' (probably raped) at a New Year's Eve party somewhere in Belfast at the end of 1940. A small or large event - I don't know. But on no evidence whatever I think that the culprit was a Canadian serviceman (of which there were many in the United Kingdom at the beginning of the war), possibly French-Canadian.

This man, who probably never knew he had engendered me (unless he was a not-so-distant Canadian cousin on my mother's mother's side, which is also a sneaking suspicion) imbued me with very few of his genes. I look very like my mother, could even (at a pinch) fit into her clothes, had the distinctive mannerism of my grandmother which was a tendency to walk with my hands behind my back. I also shared my mother's spathulate, stumpy thumbs. But these familial similarities did not penetrate the fog of my consciousness, which is still thinly present in my eightieth year.

Like myself, my mother often felt 'out of her depth' at the strange social gatherings of adults called 'parties'. Even in her fifties she looked a little unprotected at New Year's Eve parties. It has only occurred to me while writing this that she must on those occasions have remembered the fateful one which blighted her life. But later in life her unprotectedness stood her in good stead. She frequently and sturdily travelled alone and was often befriended by totally-honourable locals - in Prague, Warsaw, Lake Balaton in Hungary, Amman, the Trans-Siberian Express, Hong-Kong, Singapore...and on Cyprus, who enjoyed her eager innocence - no, naivety. This quality is not valued in men, as I found out. Both men and women find it baffling. Men are expected to be sentimental (to use Schiller's distinctiuon), not naive.

It never struck me as particularly odd that I had no father. Middle-class fathers were not particularly in evidence at that time, but I did see the fathers of some of my playmates. Perhaps I understood from the beginning of rational consciousness that I was naturally 'different', but not in the way that young gay males describe it. I was more interested in what was betweern the legs of my female playmates than what my male friends were quite happy to present for my inspection.

I didn't feel that I was a changeling for more than half an hour. I just knew, without any regret, that my life was different to those of my contemporaries. They had fathers and mothers from the time of their births, while my mother featured very little in my life before she was demobilised from the WAAF in 1945, when I was four. She had joined up (I guess) as soon as possible after giving birth to me in a mysterious but beautiful and posh establishment in Berkshire, to which she had to go after various ineffective attempts at abortion. A primary-schoolteacher in Northern Ireland could not possibly have an illegitimate child. She had intended to give me up for adoption, but that in the end she couldn't do it. And so she joined the WAAF as a maintainer of barrage-balloons and dogsbody meteorologist so that she could visit me on her time off during the mysterious year between her giving birth and adopting me.

Later she told me about cloud-types and air-streams, and I look at satellite weather-maps every day.

She told me as much as she felt she was able to, but refused to say anything about my father. And, in any case, unliuke most fatherless children, I haven't been interested. Why not ? I never fantasised a father. I am actually incapable of fantasy or making up stories. I lack imagination. Is there a foggy connection ?

Being protestant and middle-class, with a mother who had been a midwife, and a brother who was a doctor in the Navy, she was spared the appalling fate of Irish catholic mother-and-baby homes about which we know so much today. It was not so difficult to wangle her a wartime passage to England during the summer holiday when she was belatedly starting to show her increase in girth. She was extremely lucky that the wartime government had taken over lovely (if draughty) homes in the countryside for city women to give birth in. The WAAF, where she made friends easily, was infinitely more enjoyable than a Magdalen Laundry, and I was, presumably, not starved or abused, but well looked after in that lost year. Who looked after me, and where ? I never thought of asking.

In the prelude to war in 1938-1939, the UK government needed to to ensure that there were resources in the cities to care for war casualties over and above existing medical demand. The result was the establishment of the Emergency Medical Service and within it, the Emergency Maternity Service.

Maternity homes, hospitals and large properties in rural areas were commandeered to create a network of emergency maternity hospitals and later, hostels. Women in their final four weeks of pregnancy were strongly advised to evacuate from high-risk cities to billets near to these hospitals to await the arrival of their baby. On September 2, 1939, over 12,000 pregnant women left their city homes to wait out the final weeks of their pregnancy in the countryside.

I was also unaware of the Catholic-Protestant divide until I was at least eight. Our next-door neighbours in middle-class East Belfast were, it seems to me, happy catholics. I had been taken to a catholic church and soon afterwards set up an altar with candles in my bedroom...and set the house on fire.

But where did I go after this ? My mother at one point mumbled something about a Mrs Gordon. Obviously, someone looked after me, bottle-fed me unless she was a wet-nurse.
Has my dislike of large breasts and make-up anything to do with my experiences for the first year of my life ? Did I cost a lot of money ?

Until I finally, the foggy child, discovered that my look-alike Guardian was actually my mother, I referred to her by her first name, Mattie (Martha) or, 'My Aunt'. Most people who saw us together after my mid-teens must have realised the situation, but nobody told me. A significant part of the fog was Mattie's other sister, Elizabeth, who lived nearby and filled the house with antagonism when she visited the house, which she did every day that my grandmother was alive. She was happily and respectably married, with two children slightly older and slightly younger than me, who were brought up to pity - perhaps to deride - me for my ineptitude at mechanical things, numbers and suitably-boyish construction. Our house of three women and a slightly-strange child, had just one screwdriver, no pliers, one small hammer...and I had, many years later, to teach myself about electrical gadgets and, eventually, to operate an electric drill.

My grandmother, the midwife, could not abide left-handedness. When I went to pre-school I had left-handedness knocked out of me - more or less. I am still left-footed and my left arm is more powerful than my right. I wear a watch on the 'wrong' wrist. Being left-footed is a further handicap when you are bad at games which involve kicking an inane (but not harmless) ball in a cold, muddy field with a lot of boys you are wary of.

So after the 'missing year' I existed in a time of miasma, from which I started to emerge only in my seventies. This 'fog of unawareness' of the currents and world around me kept me from asking questions. My only survival technique was books. I learned to read when I was four, thereafter I have lived through books. The only people I have felt connection with since my 'teens are those who have read - or exchange - the same books : my mother, and my permanent friend for the past 30 years.

My love of books and stories may well be related to my complete lack of imagination. I was never afraid of the dark, of snakes, spiders, monsters...only male teachers and authority-figures, and of course many of my male peers. I have never been able to fantasise sexually or in any other way. I could not write two lines of dialogue or write a novel. I am extremely bad at lying - and at detecting lies. Yet I wanted to be a writer! I am in awe of those few novelists who not only do considerable research for their books, but also write with style.

It must be significant that my earliest memory is standing up in the bath to be dried by my sweet, gentle and patronised aunt Marcella who was mother to me for around 3 years, with her mother always in the background, often in the kitchen baking. I pointed to my stiff little cock and asked her what it was called. Willy, she told me. End of conversation. Was this an innocent question - in which case why do I remember it ? Or had I already picked up on the genital taboo that pervades and corrupts all civilisation ? Was I innocently taunting her, the put-upon, unbeautiful (except to me) sister who worked in an office all day at a clerical job she hated ?

My next memory is of riding my tricycle. I rode it into the centre of Belfast, and was brought back by members of the now-reviled RUC, who were always kind to protestants, especially blond-haired protestant children who 'spoke nicely'. Then come - around the age of four, I suppose, my memories of interest in what little girls didn't have between their legs.

I loved climbing trees below one particular 'tom-boy' girl (whose name I forget, though I remember the tree rather well) and pulling her pants down. She thought it naughty fun, too. But another little girl suffered badly from my predilection. We had agreed to show each other our private parts, and sworn not to tell any adult. Not only did we show each other what was between our legs, but we also explored each other tentatively.

As I should have expected, Brenda told her mother. (I have never been able to 'read' people.) Her mother went hot-foot to my grandmother, and I was caned. Immediately after my punishment I went straight to the kitchen drawer, removed a knife, went and found Brenda and slashed her big mouth in a truly reprehensible (not to say Biblical and Freudian) act. She had to get several stitches, poor girl, for her betrayal of trust.

My interest in other boys' willies came later, after I went to primary school - where my mother taught the five-year-olds. I guess it coincided with collecting frog-spawn and discovering newts and sticklebacks with boys I found attractive but was not encouraged to befriend. Probably the only physical prowess (aged 5) of my whole life, was at pissing right over the two-metre high, delightfully-smelly, algæ-green outside-toilet walls at the far end of the school playground. This alternated with my reprehensible joy at chasing the little girls into their (adjoining) toilet area and, if possible, lifting up their little skirts. I was an unholy terror, but because the school was where my mother taught, I don't remember being punished or even chastised.

Today I would be delivered into the clutches of 'Social Services' and forced to receive 'guidance' rather earlier than I in fact was. My later visits to the ridiculous Child Guidance Clinic were forced on me by the 'elite' boys-only school that I hated (but where my mother had been encouraged or bullied into spending on sending me) because of my outbursts of mis-directed rage which inevitably followed taunting by my peers. They worked out very quickly that I could be teased beyond a point of endurance when I would lash out, literally blinded by rage. They would melt into the background, and I would be apprehended having broken a window or thrown wildly whatever came to hand - sometimes accidentally hitting a 'master' with a stone or a Dinky toy, and once actually gashing a fleeing tormentor by blindly throwing a knife in his direction. This is all the more remarkable since I was despised for not being able to throw or catch a ball in the horrible 'games' of rugby or cricket that every boy had to play at least three times a week. When bad weather descended, we were forced to do cross-country runs instead. I have always hated exercise. I have always been lithe. And I am now the same weight that I was at the age of eighteen.

The patriarchal forces working on my mother encouraged her to spend more of her modest income on making me a boarder at the tight-lipped institution for continuing mental mutilation (just two miles from my home) in a final attempt to 'rub the corners off' a square peg in a round hole. My reaction to this was, first, to 'borrow' day-boys' motor-bikes during my 'study periods' and charge my batteries of resistance by going 'for a spin', a 'joy-ride' - in my school uniform and without a helmet. I kept to minor roads, and favoured the Craigantlet Hill Climb just beyond the school grounds, which was an international race in the 1950s.

And so I learned to ride a motor-bike, with very little damage done to the machines I 'commandeered'. In the 1950s motor-bikes did not have locks or ignitions: one just kick-started them and rode off - which was my most serious problem, since I am left-footed and have never been able to kick-start a bike with my right foot. Twenty-five years later I would be the proud owner of a shaft-propelled Honda CX-500 which had an ignition and self-starter. I could never have held it to the left of me in order to kick the start-lever, as I had to do with smaller bikes. Strangely, I was never made to answer for my near-suicidal escapades. There was a strange conspiracy of silence. Not even my mother mentioned it - and I had entirely forgotten about it until I started writing this page.

My second act of rebellion was to run away to France. This, however, was nipped in the bud when I slipped home in the middle of the night to collect my passport - and woke up my mother. I had just enough money for the boat to Liverpool, and hoped that on docking there I could hitch-hike and depend on the kindness of strangers.

Every psycho-doctor that I was ever sent to was, I now realise, was in considerable need of help to 'loosen up'. There was no way that any of them could help me, now (at eight years old) with added stammer which ridiculous Elocution Lessons could not help.

I was much caned between the ages of eight and eighteen. More than enough to make me, within my fog, dumbly resent all authority. But at home, despite the currents swirling around my behaviour and very existence, I never felt unloved or unappreciated. I have always felt loved, and so I have never sought love. What I looked for in others - children and adults - was inspiration...which is probably harder to find than love. For most of my life I have had to inspire myself, which has proved useful in my emotionally self-sufficient 'old age'. But if inspiration is lacking, the next best thing is adventurous companionability.

What I also had from my "aunts" was reliability - an unerestimated virtue. They could be relied upon. They taught me to be reliable. There have been very few times in my life when I failed to do as I promised, and on those occasions simple fatigue - more physical than moral - was the reason. They also said what they thought, though not necessarily at the moment when they thought it. This led me to believe - for most of my life - what other people said.

It would seem that I did not suffer from rejection in that first year. My foster-mother, too, Mrs Gordon (?) was probably a good person, whom I never had the opportunity to thank had it even entered my mind. Assuming that she lived not far from where I was born, my mother would have hitch-hiked from an air base in East Anglia to see me when she had leave, so she could monitor my condition and progress. Had she anything to do with the Gorham family of Newmarket whom she visited regularly after the war ? The fact that I probably know her name (or an approximation to it), but nothing at all about my father suggests that he might not have been a stranger, might even have had one of the surnames in my mother's family which I and others might have recognised. None of my few cousins, aunts or uncles could (or would) offer any suggestion after my mother's death.

My mother trained as a schoolteacher in what was then a new-fangled teachers' training college. In the school year 1938-9 she had the opportunity to teach in Canada, and she stayed with her cousins in Winnipeg. She adored Canada. She wanted to stay there, but in September 1939 the Second World War was declared, and she felt obliged to return to Belfast. This is bizarre, but it was a normal reaction at the time - even though Belfast would be bombed, not Winnipeg. Similarly her sister, who had been enjoying herself chastely in London, was prevailed upon to return from the vulnerable capital to her mother and her sister. For the rest of her life she regretted her decision. She hated the job she had to take in a dismal telephone accounts office of the government department of posts and telegraphs, she missed her jolly friends (a pair of whom I discovered to be lesbian after I myself merrily "came out". My strait-laced and work-ethical uncle, who had just graduated in medicine, joined up as a naval lieutenant and had a spiffing war. Men to adventure, women to drudgery...but my mother definitely enjoyed her war, and for several years afterwards visited friends she had made there.

Her final journey to where I was being fostered was to take me, now that I was formally adopted, from Berkshire to Belfast on a long, grimy, dismal trip by steam-train and boat. Having secured a cabin for both of us, she had her first experience of undressing a one-year-old placed on the top bunk. As the boat rolled, I fell on my head on to the floor. She must have wondered often if this was the cause of my 'waywardness'. More than once she wailed (as many parents have done) "What did I do wrong ?" The answer should surely have been as obvious to her as it later was to me.

I have a very hard head.

At least one of her Canadian cousins passed through Belfast a few times during the war. Food parcels came from Canada. The Canadian Rutherfords (cousins of my grandmother) featured quite a bit in my early life. I even had some other young scion of the tribe (living in St John, New Brunswick) as a pen-pal for a while. But we had nothing to share.

My grandmother and her various sisters in Ulster and in Canada, all very homely and ample women, all married dull, narrow-minded, mean men. It was only because her Masonic Grand Wizard husband had recently died that my grandmother was able to accept me into the household after the 'missing year'. In fact, his death, it now occurs to me, might have changed my mother's decision to have 'her wee bastard' adopted by someone else. Her refusal to acknowledge me as her son denied me a good, free education at the Masonic School in Dublin, which by all accounts would have been rather more congenial and mind-enlarging than the degenerate Campbell College, Belfast, with its septuagenarian and/or incompetent teachers, only a couple of whom (by far the best) had received any training in the difficult art of imparting knowledge and enthusiasm to children (like myself) who loved learning things. The only good teachers I had in my 10 years at this snooty, sporty and militarist establishment taught English, French and Biology - the subjects I excelled at, but could not combine.

Incompetent teachers do as much damage as 'child-molesters'. They are the unnatural enemies of their pupils.

The low-level but long-lasting unpleasantness that I encountered there obliterated the residue of my manic, 'precocious' playful sexual phase, which I was unable to convert to team-sport. It started to fade as I started reading more and more. It has never really returned. Apart from a few sexual encounters in the bushes of the extensive grounds of the oppressive school, I had no sexual interest in girls or boys until I was 20. At that point I had a brief but glorious infatuation with (as I have only in the last year come to realise) a very troubled girl in Denmark, who introduced me to my nipples and then dumped me for 'my best friend' who was also from Belfast. At that point my capacity for and interest in emotional sex and romance shut down until my fortieth year, when I awoke to a love of bearded faces and bodies. Even in my fortieth year black ones were not available. Come to think of it, they still are not, where I now am in rural France.

When I cruised men, what I wanted wasn't 'sex', but childish, naughty, brotherly fun with someone beautiful, preferably darker than me. My unconscious desire for an older brother or sister has, needless to say, never been fulfilled. You could say that my sexuality has never left the infantile phase. Moreover, my ludic appetite has been best satisfied - non-sexually - by dogs. Dogs are fun. Dogs aren't wounded by careless words They enjoy silliness. You can sing silly songs to them. You can chase them round the house. You can stroke their ears and rub their bellies at any time. They will always let you know when they want some attention. They are not only 'uncomplicated' but honestly appreciative. Dogs can also be vegetarian if you give them a low-carbohydrate diet with eggs.

Adults don't like other adults to be 'childish' except 'on stage' - and so we old, serious children have few or no true friends.

My last early vivid memory is of my happy wonder at seeing a picture of a black face. There were, of course, no people of colour in Belfast in the 1940s, but there were books featuring Little Black Sambo and Epaminondas with whom I fell in love. Since then I have disliked my skin colour. My timidity later on in school showers was only partly due to shame at my 'weediness', the other part was regret at my paleness. Why this should be, I don't know. Perhaps I somehow knew that people of colour were oppressed, and immediately identified with them. I made a parallel identification with ogres, whom I thought much more exciting than princesses. Thus, from the age of four, I had a different outlook on life from other children - an 'attitude' which was suppressed and repressed for the ten years that my brain was subsumed by the grotesque schooling that passed for 'top class education', such as my talented and dull, docile cousins would have thrived under - but did not receive.

My repressed misery at the posh boys' school made me consider suicide from the age of eight. But the only action I took was to stand out on the shed-roof below my bedroom window on cold wet winter nights, in the hope that I might get terminal pneumonia or TB. I can't remember if this action lasted only a short time, or was intermittent over the years.

A symptom of this misery (presumably) was my tendency to turn over in my sleep and bang my head on my hands while tunefully moaning the same four-note theme (which is the skeleton, so to speak, or embryo, of many great themes in European classical music which captivated ne as much as books). This distressed my aunt, but nobody seems to have realised that this was a reaction to stress and a call for help. I would do the same today if I were sufficiently stressed; but since I resolved on leaving school that I would never again allow myself to be subjected to stress, I have rarely resorted to it.

This I count as great success : I resisted the certain defeat that is encapsulated in the phrase If you can't beat them, join them.

But (inevitably ?) there was the sheet of thin glass or membrane of stretched cling-film between myself and others. In the rare moments of 'very good sex' I have persuaded myself (to my emotional cost) that it disappeared. I feel more distinct from my 'fellow-man' than I do from the entirely different canine species. And of course, at the end of my 'teens I too loved Hesse's Steppenwolf.

It is easy to be a hermit if you have always lived on your own, have never worn (sincve you left school) a tie or jeans or Doc Martens or a business suit, have almost never gone to dances or parties (or pubs, except to cruise), have never been part of 'pop culture', owned a television (or a microwave), bought a mortgage, life insurance, smartphone or almost anything new.

My generation - the one before the Baby-Boomers was very subdued. Even the one or two 'bad boys' to whom I was attracted before I was discouraged to do so, would not raise an eyebrow nowadays. I liked them precisely because they weren't boring, and, unlike some of the respectable kids, they didn't bully me. We took each other as we found each other. The society of the 1940s and 1950s was colourless, law-abiding, stultifying - and apathetic. This was the heyday of locking people up for having quite reasonable emotional crises and 'illegitimate' children, many of whom were packed off to The Dominions as unpaid child labour. I was very lucky that my respectable 'adoption' afforded me considerable protection. Had I been a working-class child, my errant behaviour might well have earned me a place in some kind of 'reform' establishment for the maladjusted. This is what happened to my long-term ex-lover companion-in-fondness, a quiet, introverted boy who was labelled 'difficult' because of what would now be described as mildly autistic behaviour. At different times (he is twenty years younger) the same type of insane psychiatrist declared us both 'schizoid', one of many meaningless and obscurantist psychological labels, of which schizophrenic was the most outrageous - and ubiquitous.

When I was a teenager, my 'deviant' peers were prescribed electric shock therapy for 'sexual perversions' such as nightly masturbation. Being 'undersexed' for most of my life, this was not one of my practices. Interestingly, my lack of interest in going to pubs or dances 'to meet girls' was never commented on. Sexual activity came later in those days - unless, like me, you had reduced its urgency by precocious and promiscuous during childhood.

I have never 'visited' a prostitute nor 'had recourse' to financially-agreed intercourse.I never even considered it.

But when I was in a hotel in downtown Bangui (Central African Republic, then ruled by Jean-Bedel Bokassa), a beautiful, unpainted, small-breasted chambermaid came to my room and hesitantly offered herself to me (naming no price) under the ancient, rattling air-conditioner.

If I had been raised in Africa, or even Southern Europe,I might never have ended up attracted almost entirely to bearded men, because unpainted, small-breasted, dark-hued women take my breath away.
Perhaps if they had had beards or moustaches as well, I would have floated up in ecstasy to Paradise to sit at the right front paw of the Hermaphrodite Polymorphously-perverse Creator.

The Gbaya chambermaid was somewhat disturbed by my request for her to sit on me and receive my willy slowly, from below, while we massaged each other's nipples gently. It was, she was, beautiful for, to me.
It was safe for her (since I had had a vasectomy).
I did not ejaculate. I don't think she "experienced orgasm" - but the encounter was tender and (for me) delicious, financially-rewarding for her - and not to be repeated.
Neither of us was up too late. Neither was regretfully depleted.

Between this last heterosexual encounter and my first and only heterosexual love affair I had just one brief fling - with a very sweet woman who gave me a lift in my hitch-hiking days -which lasted until my late forties. The 'sex' was 'quite nice' (as it has subsequently been with many men) but it was lacking both in lust and in love. It was sort-of-suburban, really. The fling did not last long.

DÉJÀ VU !

absolutely true !

The day after writing the above paragraph, I received a message from a man over ten years younger than I, from four départements (over 400 km) to the north-east of Rouergue where I now live happily and asexually, informing me that he would love to suck my cock ! Although (of course) i have no memory of him his guy had contacted me over ten years previously but had not fulfilled his promise to visit.

In a later message he told me that he had only recently discovered masturbation (in his sixties !) What sort of fog has he been living in ? Perhaps mine is a mere fairy mist...