When it comes to erotic writing, the more explicit it gets, the more heaving, the more panting, the more I want to laugh.

Erotic writing is said to have a noble pedigree.

The goings on in Ovid, the whipping and sad, the bare-ass wrestling in Lawrence, the garters snapping in Anius Nene, the wife swapping

and updike, the arcs of semen hither and yawn. But it's so much sexier when people don't

have sex on the page. Yet if you were a working-class boy in the 1970s, badly written books about

fucking, quickly followed in the 1980s by badly written books about shopping and fucking,

were the kinds of books your mother read.

And so, to be fair, did your father, and to be even fairer, 400 million other people.

When I was about 10, I went to a jumble sale to buy books only to discover that everything

that wasn't a copy of Jaws was by Jackie Collins, Harold Robbins, Sydney Sheldon or

Daniel Steele. I noticed this cultural deficit in my compendium of things to complain about to

God, but I read the bitch myself on the way home, and remember a very fruity passage in

which the heroine, a woman who owned a disco and was called Fontaine, had sex in a hot tub

with a very unsuitable man who might or might not have been in the mafia. I also read jaws,

but scarcely got beyond the sex scene in the beach before I came across the gouging Great White and the word sinew,

which I'd never encountered before.

I had more trouble with the carpetbaggers.

I'm not saying I knew much about the world of discos or killer sharks,

but Robbins' world of Hollywood high living

and eternal shagging was a challenge to my imagination. The term blowjob was a legendary beast

that stalked the imagination of Ayrshire boys for many years. But the style of the book remained

with me. Suddenly there was thrusting and quivering and juddering and pulsating.

...