"When a man goes on a date, he wonders if he is going to get lucky. A woman already knows..."

One night stands – quick, exciting, eyes-on-the-prize-any-holes-a-goal kind of gratification. To be enjoyed and savoured by all. My philosophy on these exhilarating adventures has always been that their purpose and function differs dramatically from your standard relationship sex; to the point where they just seem to be two entirely different activities. Like shoe shopping compared with parachuting. Not that I’ve ever had the great fortune to indulge in the latter, but I can certainly imagine the two being aeons apart. Of course, I will never tire of shopping for those sensual, high-heeled, troves of pleasure for my feet, but the concept of jumping out of a plane at 9,000 ft, hurtling towards the ground with my life in the hands of a flimsy piece of fabric strapped to my back, definitely fills me with a sense of thrill and anticipation far more intense than the prospect of a half price sale in Office. It’s the same with sex. In a relationship, I know what I’m getting and when I’m getting it. I know how I’m going to be fucked and regardless of how spicy my love life is, the fact that it’s going to be by the same man as the last 9 months somewhat dampens the buzz-factor… but introduce the metaphorical idea of a spontaneous, unexpected parachute jump and you’ve got something not unlike a one night stand. The satisfaction of successful conquest and the joyous reliving of the experience in the days that follow is a feeling incomparable to any other. The ever-present sensation of experiencing something new, unexplored and fun is something that relationship sex cannot offer, and perhaps the most significant factor in dividing the two.

Having only endured 3 ‘serious’ relationships in my 19 years, and having slept with over 20 people, I’m going to have to admit that the majority of the notches in my bedpost have been achieved in the form of one night stands (not that this is something which I feel I should be ashamed of – but that’s a different blog). My virginity, predictably, was taken in drunken, one (or two) night only fumble and since then my sexual journey has encountered quite the spectrum of man, environment and circumstance. The blame, as ever, can be placed on the fact that in my experience 16 is far too young to start having sex, and the fact that I suffered through the pretty messy demise of my first relationship in my 17^th summer prompted me to abandon all notions of self respect and go on a bit of a spree. The girls holiday to Turkey in the successive weeks clearly wasn’t the best environment in which to kick-start my newfound singledom, and upon my return to the UK I found that I had adopted a very different take on the concepts surrounding no-strings-sex. Here, I will admit that that summer of free narcotics and married men wasn’t my finest hour – but can thank it for the matured, healthy attitude I have towards sex today, so no regrets there. The morning that I returned home from an impromptu night in Brixton to find two police cars outside my house was a bit of an eye-opener – I was coerced into the living room upon entering the house by a police officer who had obviously somehow been informed of my leaving the club the previous night with an unidentified man, and warned that I must NEVER have sex with black men like that because they will in fact kidnap me and turn me into a big crack-whore. That being a summer of lessons learned, I have heeded the kindly officers advice.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned sense of triumph and achievement was seldom achieved during that particular summer – mainly due to the fact that I was on a massive rebound and, in hindsight, clearly on some kind of warped mission to regain any self-esteem lost amidst the break up. The old saying, ‘The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else’ can be adaptable, and in all honesty it wasn’t until I settled into my next relationship and was consumed by the horrors of that one that the ‘getting over’ part really came into play. These one night stands were a learning curve, and for the most part, pretty damn un-ejoyable – the exception being the rich ones. Try as we might to be un-materialistic and humble, we will always be reluctantly impressed by people with shit loads of money. And true to my word, the night spent with ‘Mr Money’ (as we cleverly dubbed him at the time) in his top-floor central London apartment was fondly recalled to friends for a good week or so afterward – not hastily forgotten in a flurry of embarrassment the following morning. Being standard procedure I’m not going to pretend that I can effectively remember any part of the actual meeting of this man in the Soho club, but waking up to a view over Tottenham Court Road in an immaculate, vast apartment with a sexy American heir (or something) was probably one of the finer examples of that summers conquests. The fact that he didn’t kick me out immediately, offered me breakfast, asked me to visit the National Portrait Gallery with him that day and even lent me two quid for a bus back to Camden combined to form the makings of a truly successful one night stand - even if the walk of shame back through Oxford Street at 11am on a Saturday morning, make-up smeared and 6-inchers in hand, was particularly horrendous. At some point during the night I had divulged that I was in fact only 17, and although pretty shocked even this didn’t seem to deter him … perhaps I should have gone to the Gallery with him that day, I might have been living it up in Maryland Estate by now!

My idea’s an notions have evolved now, and I relish the thought that as long as I’m in control, I can feel just as pleased with myself for successfully getting in someone’s pants on a night out as the next lairy geezer with an axe to grind and a point to prove. After recently being approached by one conquests' girlfriend and being assured that ‘He doesn’t love you, you know’, I was more certain than ever that the act of engaging in entirely emotion-free sex is massively empowering and fun. Some of my closest friends are people that I had once categorised under the ‘Casual Fuck’ heading, and even now can call upon the memories (or lack thereof) to provide sufficient lollage material. The long and short of it is that we all love a bit of sex, and sometimes we can’t help but tire of complicating the fundamentals with all the tribulations that come with relationships. And that’s where one night stands come in – where pre-conceptions and obligations don’t matter, and we’re all in it for the same thing.

"Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it..."

Old people are not fun. Drunk old people, reminiscing about their ‘wild’ university adventures involving stolen shopping trolleys and sherry, are even less fun. And rich drunk old people who insist on wearing monocles and talking like the queen on helium are the worst kind of company you could possibly imagine. So, when my mother offered Finn and I her spare tickets to The National Liberal Club’s annual Christmas Dinner, she was understandably surprised when we not only accepted, but began excitedly planning our outfits and the finer details of the evening endeavours - right down to how much free wine we were planning on consuming in the first half an hour of arriving.

I knew the drill. I’d been with my family every year since I was 11 and quite frankly, the novelty of dining amongst the esteemed upper classes of London’s political elite had worn off as soon as I realised that I would never have as much money as them and that Nick Clegg is prick. This time round though, my reasons for wanting to attend were far less innocent than wanting to wear a pretty dress and sit at a table with assigned name plaques. The prospect of having to participate in an hours worth of Christmas carolling alongside and under-rehearsed choir of bumbling welsh pensioners and indulge my fathers work friends’ penchants for ogling my tits for the duration of the evening did little to deter me, and armed with a pre-rolled spliff and a pair of not-so-subtle hold-ups and suspender belt underneath my elegant red dress, Finn and I boarded the Bakerloo Line for what would inevitably be a lavishly eventful evening.

You’ve read about this most prestigious of places before. Finn’s recollection of the exulted ‘Club’ in the second instalment of our blog paid a fine homage to the grandeur and luxury of the place, and this time we were going back to corrupt and contaminate it’s opulence in the only way we know how – by fucking in it. The fact that we had somehow resorted to the rather indecorous activity of having sex on a train after our previous visit to The Club had somewhat lowered the quality of the evenings proceedings - consequently, we were determined that on this occasion we would keep the extravagant standards well maintained by making use of the ideal little room we’d discovered, hidden away up a winding staircase by some seldom-used ‘lavatorial facilities’ (as the sign on the door read).

Our plan was immaculate. My mothers highly verbal detection of the lacy tops of my hold ups minutes after removing my coat was admittedly a little embarrassing, and for a fleeting moment I wondered if she somehow had clocked our naughty little conspiracy. But of course, she hadn’t. As far as she was concerned, the evening would consist of ushering her well-behaved, eloquent daughter and her polite other half around a room full of 60-something-year-old Cambridge graduates, desperately trying to convince herself that she was at home amongst the aristocratic and the wealthy. The food would be predictably divine, and the wine would be free and ever flowing. And we would all get wasted.

This last inevitability was really what Finn and I were relying on to ensure that our plan went off without a hitch. Assuming both my parents and the other guests at the dinner had enjoyed the free accompaniments to their meals to their fullest extent, a little uncontained groping and inner-thigh rubbing underneath the table would be easy to conceal, and ur exit from the dining hall would be disregarded as merely heading outside for a cigarette, or something equally as innocent. Upon our failure to return, my parents would drunkenly and naively assume that we had taken it upon ourselves to head home, or in their inebriation simply forget we were there in the first place. Despite the fact that this year the organisers of the event had cunningly chosen to serve the eagerly awaited Mince Pies and brandy after the hour-long carolling extravaganza (thus forcing guests to suffer through the badly orchestrated cacophony of singing if they wanted any fucking cake) we subtly made our departure early under the pretence that Finn was indeed going for a smoke, and predictably, nobody questioned it. The fact that we managed to stage this manoeuvre as discreetly as we did is really rather impressive, considering that by this time the under-table-groping had reached an extent where my suspender belt and thong had all but been removed and to stop the somewhat imaginative underwear slipping down and exposing our plan I had to adopt a strange kind of waddle to wedge it between by legs and my dress. Once we had made our way up to the toilets and that special little room with the floor-to-ceiling mirror and ornate antique-looking chair, the fact that my underwear had already been discarded came in pretty damn handy.  After ensuring that the door was firmly locked and a final once-over to check that their weren’t any hidden camera’s surreptitiously placed to spy on women changing and ruin any young, hot couples’ dirty intentions, the rest of the essential clothes were removed and the deed was done in a seamless, sexy and successful operation which quite frankly left us on an orgasmic high; and reasonably reluctant to return to the room full of rich, drunk, old pretentious twats who were undoubtedly by this point all passed out in pools of their own vomit anyway.

Finding ourselves in a small, busy and horribly over-priced club half an hour later, the sexual restrictions had been dropped and our post-orgasmic ecstasy has engulfed us. We had drawn out, between us, another hundred or so quid and the fact that we were pissed and dancing like a couple of porn stars at a live sex show took nothing away from the class and eloquence of the evening, in my opinion. We had successfully managed to copulate in a state building which had been reserved up until very recently for selected, influential libertarians wishing to smoke Cuban cigars and discuss the finer workings of David Lloyd George’s political policy – people who had no doubt never had sex in their entire lives. The sense of accomplishment was particularly satisfying and I refused to be lowered from my pedestal even after I had openly toppled over on the dance floor and a drunken Dutch man had apologetically explained to Finn that the reason he had touched his arse at the bar was because he had assumed he was a woman – guess guys don’t really have long hair on the continent. In fact, our buoyancy was at such a level that after closing time, our excitement was so compelling that we decided a phone box (a clear, glass one) just off Leicester Square would be the ideal little love-box to engage in yet more lusty interaction – fortunately for both of us my state of intoxication was not as all-consuming as Finn’s, and this plan was prematurely halted before we were arrested. We managed to complete the rest of our journey home on the N18 without any further humiliation or attempts at sexual liberation, and the epic wine-hangover the next morning was a small price to pay for that evening’s achievement – after all, what’s good sex without a little risk?