The day juddered into some semblance of life. In the tunnels under the city mail trains disgorged their loads, including, amongst the tons of envelopes and packaging some forty-seven spools of processed Super-8, only four of which need concern us.

In the streets above, paper vans jettisoned their daily piles of happy news. A local councillor implicated in the selling-off of fresh-dug graves to a small but extremely industrious ring of necrophiles. A cabinet minister fingered for the manufacturing of Semtex in his garden shed and selling it off to the highest bidder. A back-bench member of parliament found hanging by his nipples in a Mayfair flat with a plastic bag over his head and three live lobsters in little knitted berets up his backside.

The usual drill, basically, and pretty-much par for the course for the people who took a country made of coal and floating in a sea of oil and cod, sold everything that wasn’t nailed down and then shat on the pitifully whimpering wreckage of everything that remained from a height.

Anyhow, and more to the point in hand, some two weeks before, the National Bi Conference had been held, but partly due to a small mix-up with the Associated Press, and partly due to the vagaries of newspaper scheduling anyway, only now was there a press response - i.e. everybody, gay or straight, other than The Guardian and what for various reasons we shall refer to simply if not entirely originally as The Scum, completely and utterly ignored it.

The Guardian piece was vaguely friendly - if leaving one with the impression that to be bisexual was to be a sociology student with a straggly beard, a control complex and a beergut. Or, if one were male, a New Man of such cloying supersensitivity as to cause instant diabetic collapse in whosoever so much as beheld one.

The Scum on the other hand, with the tolerance and restraint for which it was justly famous, told of how cleaners in a university halls of residence were SHOCKED to find USED CONDOMS and MASKS having slithering THREE-IN-A-BED SEX and how the full, lurid details, together with shots of a couple of supremely bored models done up like lipstick lesbians and licking oysters off each other, would be available in the Sunday Filth.

* * *

And in a black room lit flickering by scattered candles, Kara Davies hauled herself up onto one elbow and lightly traced an arabesqued nipple with her free hand; gripped it gently between fingernails, absently traced the aureole with a fingertip. ‘I just love looking at you. I can’t keep my eyes off you.’

‘Mm?’ Micqui Blaine pressed a cheek to Kara’s side, looked up at her, eyes turned simultaneously dark and flaring, like polished onyx, in the candle light. She smiled. She couldn’t stop smiling.

‘You can look at what you like,’ she said, her voice warm and drowsy with a contentment that had nothing much to do with sleep.

She pressed her body closer - and was surprised by her sudden surge of hot and engorged wetness. She parted her thighs and slid herself slowly up and down a small section of Kara’s thigh. ‘You can do what you like.’

She had never, quite, felt this before; this fever-heat, the sense of bodies perfectly moulded together, meshing so completely.

Micqui looked back upon some of the mildly rougher stuff that would, ordinarily, back home, have taken careful and sober negotiation after a relationship lasting maybe a month or more, and she was mildly shocked.

The scratching and the biting and the slapping around that had to be finely judged, completely under control and was never quite gotten exactly right had, had suddenly, miraculously, at the hands and mouth of this English woman, this stranger she had met barely nine hours before, become everything she had ever wanted or dreamed.

She had mauled and been mauled by some fabulous beast that was somehow both an extension of herself and something utterly other and, frankly, since this is getting far too lovey-dovey by half, she had come her brains out.

NEXT: How Did We Get Here?

(I was really, really, gonna put up the chapter of SelaFane with Hot Lesbo Action in it, but I came down with a cold … and being a shut-in I'd avoided colds for a couple of years, so it hit me like a ton. This got me thinking about stuff to drink thro it.)

Anybody of a certain age, on a cold day, will remember cups of Hot Bovril - or, at at a pinch, OXO cubes in hot water - and for us it's like a rocket back to childhood. And, like many aspects of our childhood, it could so with some distinct improvement. So:

- Cup of Hot Bovril (or Hot OXO) to which you add …

- Big splosh of lemon juice.
- Good big shake of Tabasco
- Grind of black pepper
- A measure of Vodka
- A splosh of dry sherry

And that really perks you up and makes you feel better.

But Dave, I hear you ask, why do you put alcohol in a hot drink? Won't it boil off?

To which I respond: HOW THE FUCK DID YOU GET INTO MY ROOM? I'VE GOT A KNIFE HERE! I'LL CUT YOU WITH MY KNIFE IF YOU COME A STEP CLOSER!

After I've calmed down a little, I respond thus: You are dumb to think alcohol boils off in stuff. Yes, alcohol has a boiling-point of like seventy degrees, but water has a boiling point of a hundred degrees, and all the water doesn't suddenly vanish when you boil it in a kettle.

You are so dumb you might as well be called Mister Dumb, on account of how dumb you are.

And now you're suitably chastised, here's some other hot drinks you can dump alcoholic stuff in:

- Tea with brandy. There's a certain interaction between the grape-based spirit and the tannins that elevate it into something other than yer Irish Coffee stuff.
- Hot milk and Scotch, with a dusting of cinnamon. (I prefer a really nice bourbon, personally, when I want something sweeter than scotch. Also, a sweet brandy like Metaxa goes really well with hot milk.
- Mulled beer. Use a really strong dark beer with any mulled-wine recipe you can think of, and it's all the better for it.

Long story short, there's nothing about the state where you're ejecting crawlingly diseased mucus out of every orifice that isn't several hundred percent better better with a healthy shot of alcohol.

That is all.

- Take two slices of packaged Granary bread. Lightly toast em.
- Butter em with salted butter.
- Slather on a good thick layer of CRUNCHY peanut butter.
- Then (and this is the clever bit) sprinkle on a good big pinch of Herbs de Provence.

There are, of course, several things you can do with the banana - but if you expect such an obvious gag from me then you little know your man. And you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself.

- Slice up a banana. Ideally, said banana should be ripe to the point of mushy. Arrange on top of the slices.

At this point, a lesser bunny would be done … but oh no, not you, you're a better bunny than that! And don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

- Repair to your big frying pan or skillet. Heave in the slices (peanut butter and banana side up, idiot) and briefly fry up the undersides in HOT sunflower oil.
- Decant on plate. Mash the two slices together to make a sammich. Cut in half, and lightly dust with icing sugar.

Then you're done. And you're quite, quite welcome.