One balmy summer afternoon in my final year at prep school, a group of my fellow-prefects and I gathered under the apple trees on the slope by the croquet lawn where only prefects were allowed, and reminisced about the five years we’d spent together. ‘Do you know, Delingpole,’ said one of them, ‘it was you who taught us all how to wank.’
This is possibly the nicest compliment anyone has ever paid to me and even though it was completely unwarranted – branleur? moi? – I have endeavoured to live up to it ever since by broaching the subject with friends, acquaintances and strangers as often as decently possible; by collecting wanking anecdotes (the man caught in flagrante by his au pair; the man whose father decided to appear on a ladder outside his bedroom window just when. . .); and by including worryingly long, squirm-inducing passages on the subject in two out of three novels.
The thing I like about wanking, apart from the obvious, is that even though almost everyone does it, possibly even you, dear reader, it’s still one of those subjects that hardly anyone talks about.
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