and other devices, like blowing air on the glans penis, in order to maximise the pleasure of that act.

Being Scousers, they did not of course put it in such elegant terminology. It was more likely to be: “I’d rather a fella sucked me dick ‘cos me tart hasn’t a fuckin’ clue how to do it.” It made me wonder if we wouldn’t all be better off in a world inhabited solely by men, with children farms, using hired women and studs, dotted round the country!

At this distance in time, I have few detailed memories of these hunky, haveable hets in the Liverpool of the mid-50s. But there is one, which is why I know it was around my 23rd birthday. Because on that night I was determined to have something, anything almost (well, not quite) as a birthday present for myself. At a very late hour indeed (it was a weekday, with work on the morrow), at somewhere round 0200, I think, I found myself fumbling with somebody in a dark cottage just off Hardman Street, and whispered to this man that I’d like him to come home with me, and he agreed.

Once outside, I discovered that my man was black, or at least very dark café-au-lait. He was my first coloured guy. I’m surprised he was my first, because Liverpool had a large "ethnic" (today’s politically correct term) population, and the district I lived in, even more so.

My man was from the Caribbean, and was a sweet, tender lover. He was hung, and he liked it all ways, and stayed the night. Before he left in the morning, I said I was itching to say something to him. Namely, that legend had it that blacks thought whites had a special smell. “Right on,” he said. So I said that I thought blacks had a different special smell too, and I liked it!

I must now take a leap forward in time, 20 years or so, to the mid-70s. I had been living quite a number of years in Geneva, and had graduated to my last flat there, towards the airport. I worked in Carouge, on the other side of town, and lunched - fairly liquidly - most days at a café on the main drag, which was owned by a mad, coarse, stupid and philandering Yugoslav, and his older Swiss-German wife. Why she had ever married him, I couldn’t imagine. I suppose he must have had a huge dick.

Around this time, new help with serving in the café arrived, in the (shapely) shape of a young and handsome Yugo called R. He was yet another illegal immigrant in Helvetia, without a work permit, but the problem was avoided by paying him (very little) in cash. He also had to avoid all involvement with the polizei, otherwise he would have been across the border before you could say chaasechuecheli (aka little hot cheese tarts).

He was as sexy as all hell and get out, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, and his bulging crotch, especially in summer when he took to wearing (while working!) the tightest and briefest possible blue denim shorts. When he dropped a fork or something and had to bend over to pick it up, I practically creamed in my pants. He turned me on, and even in front of my workmates I began to flirt with him pretty obviously.

He was not stupid, but had little education. He was a storekeeper by profession. But something that I admired about him was