EDUCATING PETER
By Sebastian Wallace
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Feedback welcome: sebastian_wallace@yahoo.co.uk
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A couple of years ago, I had to spend three months as a junior doctor in Southampton General Hospital as part of my medical training. This meant that, because of the long hours and irregular shifts, I had to move into the cramped student accommodation located at the back of the hospital.

I ended up sharing a room with another medic called Peter. I must admit that I'm not too keen on sharing, but some of my mates ended up in rooms with two or even three other guys, so I guess that I was actually pretty lucky to end up as I did.

While Peter and I wouldn't ever have been natural friends, he was a decent guy and we got along reasonably well as imposed roommates for the couple of months of my stay. He tended to use the room entirely for the bed and the wardrobe: when he wasn't sleeping or changing clothes, he was out. He played a lot of rugby and I gather he spent most of his free time either on the rugby pitch or in the pub with his mates. So the temporary loss of my privacy wasn't such a blow.

One thing that was pretty clear from the start, though, was that Peter saw the room very much as venue for masturbation, regardless of whether I was in it or not. He made no secret and no excuses about that. In fact, he made no references to it all: he would just habitually masturbate, without shame or embarrassment, before he went to sleep or when he woke up. Neither of us ever said anything about it; it was just something he did.

Even though our shifts only occasionally coincided and so he often was at work when I was sleeping, I soon became familiar with his routine. He was very much a lad of habit and rarely ventured from his established pattern. If he was pissed, he'd usually just go straight to sleep and have a wank when he awoke. If he came in straight from work, he'd usually pull himself off before sleeping and make do with just a coffee when he got up. But if he was talking to his girlfriend on the phone before bed, he'd usually have a wank both before sleeping and when he woke up.

One weekend his girlfriend came down from Birmingham, where she was working, to stay over with him. I was kind of interested to see how that would affect his routine but decided I really ought to give him a bit of privacy and so spent that weekend staying with Helen, my girlfriend, even though it meant an hour's trek across the city before and after every shift at the hospital.

I remember being kind of surprised when I first saw Peter wanking. It must have been on the second or third day of my stay in the hospital accommodation, and I'd just returned from a fairly rigorous fourteen-hour Friday night shift on A & E. I think it was about seven in the morning and, as I was getting into the bed, feeling shattered, Peter's alarm went off: his shift was about to start.

I got into bed and tried to relax despite the lingering affects of the caffeine and adrenaline I'd been living on throughout most