All that month I lay awake for hours each night, quivering in the delight of knowing that with every inspiration I was sharing her sleeping breath.And now she's in the Telegraph, a monitory fundamentalist, saying no There's her picture I'd swear to it Still beautiful, still saying no. Mrs Atkins was Viola then, and we all slept in an old schoolhouse. I spent a month in Harlech one summer, playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night. She came round for tea, her presence imparting an intense erotic charge to the Fitzbillie's chocolate cake, like a nimbus.

She was Anne Briggs, the headmaster's daughter at King's Choir School in Cambridge I was an undergraduate and my heart yearned for her She played the harp She had great big blue eyes and yellow hair. It was a strikingly novel approach, her repertoire of advice, from the columns I have read, being confined to: "Leave it alone or it will drop off", "Pull yourself together or God will get you" and "No".Doubtless this spreads comfort and reassurance in the venial shires, but I couldn't help remembering the days when Mrs Atkins lay on my chaise longue and I knelt at her feet, worshipping her.She wasn't Mrs Atkins, then. Which is when I started to think of Mrs Anne Atkins, the Daily Telegraph agony aunt.You'll know about Mrs Atkins: the vicar's missus who went on Thought for the Day and said something to the effect that homosexuality was inevitably, absolutely and invariably bad and naughty and terribly terribly wrong, and if God had chosen to inflict upon you the awful curse of being a beastly homo, then your only option was to offer up your affliction to Jesus as a sort of sacrifice.The Daily Telegraph immediately seized upon this, rubbing their hands in glee (they must get the stuff delivered in huge tubs, like catering Stork) and hired Mrs Atkins as their new agony aunt. I suppose it was because he was shy and innocent and nice and seemed a bit bewildered and looked as though he needed mothering; but there she was, reclining on a chaise longue in one of those cobweb silk dresses like a petticoat, and there he was, kneeling at her feet; and there they were, captivating each other.

So we drank some Roederer Cristal and chatted some more and then they began to thin out a bit more, which was alarming but not too alarming, and in any case Young Love was in bloom: the diffident navigation chap had been utterly captivated by the most nubile of the nubilia, and, astonishingly, she seemed to have been captivated by him too. Any one of them could have single-handedly enslaved a synod or brought down a regime; oddly enough, the effect was slightly diluted en masse: you didn't know quite where to feast your eyes, nor exactly how many of them there were.So we drank Dom Perignon and chatted to the girls and they began to thin out a bit so one could get a grip on how many there were, which was: more than enough. Just us. It had started off so promisingly as we trooped into the billionaire playboy's luxury Belgravia residence, me and him and someone in the music business and a beaming innocent who had installed the global navigation system in the billionaire playboy's yacht or jet or helicopter or bloody Jacuzzi - God knows which because I wasn't listening.You wouldn't have listened, either, because accompanying us, like something out of an H M Bateman cartoon, was a gleaming troupe of nubilia. Perhaps that's because, after a few drinks and a spot of dinner, he went home and wrote his column and got a good night's sleep while I went home and found a message on the answering machine saying, "Why not come and join us for a drink?" So eight hours later there I was, in the Jacuzzi with the billionaire playboy and.. and nobody, in fact. The gentlemen's club chap is in the same line of business as me, but a lot richer A lot.