CHAPTER ONE

       ‘Seven weeks before I was due, the silly bugger got down on one knee whilst I was washing up. We tied the knot at Lancaster Registry Office, with a lollipop lady as the witness and Eddie with a daffodil in his buttonhole. My waters broke, just as we were about to consummate our wedding in a B&B in Lytham St Anne’s. Eddie has never forgiven Joel for the timing, and he’s thirty-three now.’

       Linda, 56, Preston

      I’d always believed that sleeping with your male best friend would have one of two outcomes. Either it would be a unanimous disaster, from which your friendship would never recover. Or it would be an epiphany. You’d wonder why on earth you’d never done this before.

      I’d experienced the first: Gavin Stroud, Manchester University, 1998. Gavin was my best mate on my French course, until a moment of inebriated madness – round about the four-pint point, the point at which I obviously believed I was irresistible to all members of the opposite sex. That’s also the point at which I should have gone to bed, my dignity still intact. But no, it was at this point I decided Gavin Stroud needed to know this: that my French oral in class wasn’t half as good as that in the bedroom and that I looked erotic dancing to Purple Rain. We went back to my room in halls, shut the orange and brown curtains and poured each other glass after glass of cheap white wine. With each glass, the edges of his face grew more blurred as did any good judgement I’d ever possessed. After an hour of Purple Rain on repeat play and even longer trying to get a comatosed Gavin to maintain an erection long enough to get a condom on, we passed out. When I woke up, head feeling like someone had mown over it, the blackheads on his nose rather too close for comfort, I knew it had been a big, huge, no…colossal mistake. The five-minute walk across campus to our first tutorial that day was one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. How can you act normally when you’ve just spent the night wrestling with your (I think I could now safely say) ex friend’s uncooperative penis? Trust me. There’s no coming back from there.

      But Jim is different. Sex with him is never a disaster, it’s just it has never been a light-bulb moment either. It’s just, you know, nice. Like getting into a warm bath after a freezing day, or finding a twenty pound note in your jeans pocket.

      We met in November 1997, second floor of the John Rylands Library, Manchester University, both of us wading through our very first English essay in Critical Theory (critically dreary more like). At eighteen years old I was a dangerous mixture of ecstatic and terrified to be officially ‘independent’. Two years my senior, Jim seemed like he’d been knocking around on his own all his life. He was sitting opposite me with his head buried in The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes as was I (and probably every other first year English Lit student in there). But it was the intense frown that really made me laugh, it told of utter and total bafflement. My feelings exactly!

      ‘Is that making about as much sense to you as it is to me?’ I said, hoping this guy with legs so long his feet were nearly touching mine under the table was in need of distraction too.

      Jim looked up.

      ‘I.e. none whatsoever?’

      ‘That’s the one!’

      He smiled, broadly.

      ‘Put it this way,’ he said. ‘If this death of the author lark means it’s all down to the reader’s interpretation then I’m screwed because I haven’t got the first clue what this French nutter’s on about.’

      ‘Me neither,’ I whispered back. ‘I thought I’d be studying books, literature – you know, novels innit…’ Jim laughed. ‘But it’s all structuralism this and post-structuralism that, seminology…’

      ‘Semiology,’ he corrected.

      ‘Yeah, that’s what I meant,’ I said, feeling suddenly embarrassed.

      That was it, we were off. Couldn’t shut us up for two whole hours. We sacked off work and went for a pint in the end because neither of us could fathom what ‘Barthes Simpson’ as we christened him that day was on about and we were having too much of a good time chatting. When I stepped out of the student union into the crisp November air, I felt like we’d cracked the secret to something that afternoon, Jim and I. Life, probably, or maybe that was just the beer. But for all the personality fireworks I didn’t fancy Jim that day, still don’t, maybe that’s why sex with him has never been a big deal. It’s not that Jim’s un-fanciable, far from it, he’s just not my type. He’s cigarette-thin with Scottish skin and dark hair that flicks out at the sides and on top due to cow licks and various double crowns. He’s got nice full lips – if a little gormless on occasions; a sturdy, prominent nose – attractive on a man I’ve always thought; and green, sparkly eyes that crinkle up so much when he laughs they almost disappear. But I’ve never felt the urge to tear his clothes off.

      And so if you had told me on that day we met (or any other day during the next eight years and six months which is how long it took us to kiss, never mind have sex: hardly a whirlwind romance) that one day James Ashcroft and I would be occasional shag partners, I’d never have believed it. But we are and it’s strange, most of all because I don’t really get why it did take us so long. Until one warm weekend last May to be exact.

      It was supposed to be two days’ hard graft cleaning up my parents’ caravan, which along with fifty or so other caravans on the tiny site in Whitby hung precariously off a cliff like a stranded sheep. I’d agreed to give it a makeover in return for a hundred quid from my dad and Jim was the only person I knew who had a power drill, but from the first moment we got there, it felt more like a holiday than hard work.

      I’ve never known