Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This

Cures for insomnia are a current topic on the Guardian Letters page. I fear it will run for as long as the eventually tedious one on uses for 35m film canisters.
Now that I blog I never get the urge to write to The Guardian. It's been so long since I did so that I'm not sure my green biro even works any more.
But why would I want to share my rantings with hundreds of thousands of people when I can share them with several hundred of the discerning and mostly wonderful people who make up the micro-readership of this blog?

A cure for insomnia I sometimes use is an alternative to counting sheep. I attempt to count the number of people I've had sex with in my life.
Although I don't consider myself to have been a particularly promiscuous person, I invariably recall someone who has never previously figured in these late night lucubrations. This may be because it can take thirty years for alcohol-induced amnesia to wear off.
Unfortunately, you can then spend a long time asking yourself the same questions you asked on the morning you found them next to you in bed:
Who are they?
Where did you meet them?
What's their name?
[The use of 'they' and 'them' is not intended to imply there was more than one person at a time. Well, not usually].

Another reason this cure for insomnia is seriously flawed is that you sometimes remember a particularly enjoyable experience and that can trigger the release of all the wrong chemicals in your brain. Sleep is then the last thing on your mind and you have to quickly conjure up images of Anne Widdecombe in the shower. Everyone was put on this earth for a purpose and that woman is a veritable lumberjack to Morning Wood, Evening Wood, an entire Sherwood Forest of wood.

Laughter is not conducive to sleep either and there's always the risk that you remember some of your funnier sexual experiences. That doesn't mean they were funny at the time, which is just as well because laughter and sex can often be uneasy bedfellows.
Laughter can often be instrumental in getting someone between the sheets but if the removal of your Y-Fronts provokes hilarity rather than passion it's probably a case off 'booster rocket fired....we have lift off....er....Houston, we have a problem.'

It wasn't funny at the time when I said to someone "Don't worry, you'll get an erection soon", only to receive the distressed reply "But I've already got one."
Although it makes me smile now, it was disconcerting when Jean-Pierre, an allegedly straight French guy, breathed in my ear and whispered "God, I wish you had tits."
"You French are so romantic", I replied sarcastically, which was one in the eye for that arrow that did for poor King Harold in 1066.
As Simon Fanshawe quoted in yesterday's Guardian 'the difference between straight and gay is five pints of lager'. Or, in that case, half a bottle of Pernod.

Five or more pints of lager can also engender an Equal Opportunities Policy where sex is concerned, albeit not intentionally.
Only yards from my flat, a silver-tongued Irish boy with more blarney than Wogan on speed told me the craic was good and the night was young, before adding ominously "there's something I should have told you."
"You're straight", I said, "or a priest...... or you're on active service for the IRA". (This was London in the 1970s).
"No, I've got an artificial arm. Is that OK?"
"Er, yes, absolutely fine. So long as everything else is real."
"You really hadn't noticed?"
"Well, the pub was very crowded. You could hardly lift your hand to scratch your nose. Well you couldn't, obviously. But neither could I. Nobody could. Do you fancy a coffee?"

I've always been squeamish about prosthetic limbs, ever since as a small child I saw the film about Douglas Bader, who lost both legs in the war.
But lager and lust are a potent combination and, whilst a straight Frenchman might still regard tits as a sine qua non to coucher avec moi, the odd arm being AWOL on a gay Irishman soon became a matter of supreme indifference to me.
I even helped him unscrew it before we went to bed, so my parents' misguided idea of giving me a Meccano set for Christmas had finally proved useful. In short, everything was going swimmingly.
Until, that is, the point in the proceedings where waves crash against the shore and fireworks explode in the sky, which was interrupted by a tremendous crash.
I sat bolt upright in bed.
"Oh my God! What's that?"
It sounded as though the police were smashing down the door.
"It's all right", said Seamus, "my arm's just fallen off your dressing table."

The detumescent effect could not have been greater if Seamus had metamorphosed into Ian Paisley.
If only the earth had moved before the arm did.

In case you are thinking that my life has been a feckless fandango of one night stands, I should add that there were one or two more stands with Seamus but to avoid his arm going walkabout again we always laid it on the floor.
And that's another reason why these recollections are such a bad cure for insomnia. For every ten 'What the hell was I thinking ofs?' there's always one 'What if?'
Youthful sexual encounters occur before you've untangled the complex threads of love and sex, of looks and character. Before you've realised that relationships, like politics, are the art of compromise.

Seamus wasn't 'drop dead gorgeous', a fact that had nothing to do with his missing arm. That only features prominently in my memory because of the unfortunate timing with which it fell off the dressing table.
But what shines brightly over a distance of thirty years is an extraordinary sweetness of nature, an inherent goodness, and a great capacity to love and be loved.
That's why 'casual sex' is such a misleadingly derogatory term. Yes, it can be as empty and meaningless as some long-term relationships. But it can also be loving and life-enhancing.
A few hours can be a significant event in the narrative of your life and a part of who you are. Maybe in some parallel or alternative universe it never happened. But in this universe it did happen and can never un-happen. A casual encounter can be forever and that is something to celebrate and sleep on.
Goodnight.
Sweet dreams.

[Some names have been changed to protect the identity of people who, if still alive, could now be married, or famous, or leading libel lawyers].