In which The Author’s self-imposed confinement reaches the seven-day mark
In Portion Control I told you how, fearing another run-in with Sue P., I decided to dig my cock harness out from the drawer and wear it for the weekend. I eventually took it off on Monday night. In the meantime (apart from a brief interval here and there) I’ve worn the cock ring pretty much full-time. I’m getting quite used to the latter now. The harness is more difficult to cope with long-term, as it constantly reminds me of my predicament (no pun intended!)
However, I was glad yesterday that I’d decided not to wear it, as I had another of those chance meetings which occur every so often. Last Sunday night, Lynne took into her head to pour a large vodka and Coke into my Netbook. My pal Marc thinks it might be salvageable. but I’m not sure. In the meantime, Rhian has loaned me her laptop, which is what I’m using now. It’s a lot bulkier, much heavier, and far less portable than the Netbook, but at least it works for more than half an hour on a full battery.
So it was that yesterday afternoon, I found myself in Wetherspoon in Aberdare, trying with varying degrees of success to use their wifi. I’d finished typing up the previous entry and was uploading my photos of Blackwood to the Vanishing Valleys project when two young women approached the table. One of them asked if there was a socket she could plug her phone charger into. After shifting the table slightly, we plugged the charger in and they sat opposite me. I was trying to reconnect to the Cloud (which seemed to have lifted temporarily.) After a few minutes, once the second attempt at the upload was underway, we got talking.
The smaller and more talkative of the two was called Becky S. The other was her half-sister Hannah R. We initially chatted about the problems with the Aberdare Wetherspoon WiFi (which works first time in all the other pubs I’ve tried it in) and the conversation went from there.
It turned out that Becky lives in the street where I grew up, two minutes or so from my house. Like Helen R., she’s bringing up her young son on her own. When I outlined the idea behind Vanishing Valleys she got excited. She knows Caegarw (the eastern half of Mountain Ash) very well. Once my new camera is sorted out, she’s offered to show me the old industrial artefacts on the mountainside above the town.
Both of the girls are interested in psychology, and it turned out that we had a lot in common. I showed them the book I’m currently reading – Wiseman, R. (2007) Quirkology: The curious science of everyday lives (London: Macmillan) – and seem to have recruited two new members to the Cosmic Tigger Lending Library.
Then our collective train of thought was suddenly derailed. Actually it wasn’t so much a derailment, more of a head-on collision with a runaway freight service. Having spotted the book, a guy decided to force himself into the conversation, in exactly the way I described in Freaks, Geeks and Space Invaders. He’s younger than me, about the same height and build, with curly dark hair and a full beard. I’ve seen him around town for several months, but we’ve never crossed paths before. I’m glad, in retrospect.
He’s originally from Leeds, apparently. There’s no doubt that he’d be an interesting chap to talk to – he name-checked William Burroughs, Genesis P. Orridge, Robert Anton Wilson, and other counterculture luminaries – if only he’d actually stop for breath! It would be fun to put him and Shanara in a locked room and see who managed to get a word in edgeways first.
Like so many of the weird people I’ve encountered recently, he was showing the telltale signs of drug/alcohol induced mental illness. I believe that we’re all entitled to whatever bizarre opinions we choose to hold, but nobody has any Goddess-given right to impose them on others. Certainly, nobody has the right to approach a group of total strangers and start preaching whatever belief system they subscribe to.
Hannah decided to go to the Ladies’ and left Becky and me in the company of this outwardly amiable, obviously intelligent, but extremely trying nutter. After he told her that she was only wearing make-up because of social pressures, and that she was sacrificing her individuality in order to ‘fit in,’ I could see that Becky was starting to lose patience with him. Meanwhile, like many people with a high IQ but a very low EQ, he simply continued to blather on until he ran out of things to say. He returned to the beer garden and rejoined a couple with whom he’d been drinking and smoking before coming in to use the toilet.
Once he was out of earshot, I put Quirkology away and told the girls, ‘That’s why you should never produce a book in a pub!’ We returned to our previous conversation, and ended up having up what Jeff in work and I used to call a ‘silly afternoon.’ (Rhian and I have them now and again, and they’re usually completely spontaneous as well!)
It didn’t take long for Professor Whitebread (‘I’m a Yorkshireman – I say what I like and I like what I bloody well say!’) to come back. His friends had buggered off, and he was looking for someone else to latch on to. He asked if he could join our table. By now, Rhian’s laptop was back in its case and occupying the fourth chair. I’d almost finished my drink. Becky wasn’t far from finishing hers. Hannah had only just got a fresh one, and had managed to cunningly conceal it behind the menu, leaving her empty glass visible.
I told him that we were just about to make our way home, and he seemed a bit put out. Hannah wasn’t too impressed by the way that I gave him the brush-off, but Becky defended my position, and said that she’d probably have been a bit more ‘direct’. After a while, we decided to get a refill anyway. By now, the loony was sitting at the next table, and muttered something about the Zos Kia Cultus as he left for another smoke. Name-dropping will get you nowhere.
After a while. we went outside so the girls could have a smoke. While we were sitting in the beer garden, Becky said how much she liked my clothes – I was wearing a chunky purple poloneck over a thin purple poloneck, my skinny jeans, and purple gloves. (I noticed that Prof Whitebread hadn’t said anything to me about following the herd!) She said she’d like a sweater similar to it, only in bright pink. She missed her chance, unfortunately. They had a whole range of colours in H&M in Cardiff a few years ago, when I bought mine. I toyed with buying a couple of others, but decided against it at the time.
Now, picture the scene: I’ve been captured by two attractive, intelligent, charming, funny young women; one of them is telling me that she’s into knitwear, and the other did Textiles GCSE and knows how to knit! All of a sudden, the cock ring seemed very much the lesser of two evils. True, it was confining and somewhat uncomfortable (no pain, no gain!) but at least I could get turned on by the mental image of Becky in a chunky sweater. If I’d been wearing the harness, I’d have had no chance of getting an erection. And that, I suppose, is the sign of a true fetishist – just the mental representation of the object is enough to stimulate the neural pathways and cause arousal.
I spent last night with no form of restriction, as that image kept popping up in my mind’s eye. It was the first time for seven days that my genitals had been unbound. However, I’m back in the harness today, just in case Sue P. shows her face at some point and tries to cop another feel. I think that’s going to be my regular regime from now on – cock ring through the week, harness at weekends. And I’m definitely going to ask Sam what happened to our old toy when I see her next.
An Autobiography in Random Chapters 