Bad sex prize

I forgot to write about it when it was awarded. I'm pretty sure I will not be in the running for next year's prize, not because I am a brilliant writer about sex, but because I was by quite a long way too reticent to touch the subject with a bargepole. Whatever, re literary sex, there were for me, like for a lot of people, a couple of more or less florid novels that came at an impressionable time.

One was either Romancing the Stone or Jewel of the Nile (a vivid but unclear memory). I have no idea why I bought it. Unless, maybe, I flicked through it in WH Smiths and found some sex. That certainly rings possible. I mean, I was about fourteen.

But that pales into nothing beside Testkill, by former England cricketer Ted Dexter (who once reputedly drove a ball from the Jesus College cricket pitch over the chapel, which is a long way and let's leave it at that) and some other guy. I barely remember the story - it was about a murder during an Ashes match or some such - but it had some passages of sex, and somewhere, referring to the villain I hope, was the line, 'Byron was a cold, superb lover.' I didn't really understand what it meant then, and I'm not sure I do now, but the phrase has never left me.

(I have already had my best moment that I will ever have of writing about sex, by the way. It's the line, delivered as an intentional joke: 'In my experience, women don't really enjoy sex anyway.')