Men like me don't get together with women like Aster very often. And that's because on paper it's all wrong. I was twenty years older than her. She was black and I was white. She was gorgeous and I was… well, I had done all right with women over the years but I had never considered myself to be handsome. Now that the age battle was getting the better of me, I was looking at a different area of the spectrum as regards wome...

“Goodnight, darlin’,’’ said the old man as he strolled past, admiring the shape of a woman in a crouch, her bottom extended and her crotch stretched invitingly. What fun they could have if she were doing this naked, in the splendid privacy of his little flat. Life is so tedious, Jackie thought to herself as she stooped to put the padlock on the bottom of the rolling shutter. Why did they even have this shutter? Although t...

It was my great good fortune a few short years ago to spend some time in Guyana, and I became a member of a small church in the capital, Georgetown. It was there that I met Mollie, with whom I shared a pew whenever she was there, and I have already written about her in a story called Gentle Persuasion. We got together only once, just before I left the country. But Mollie wasn’t the only attractive middle-aged black woman...

Miriam was Nigerian but had lived in London since she was eighteen. Now she was around fifty and a secondary school teacher. She had a son but had never married, and what made that remarkable was that she was deeply religious, to the point of having had grave reservations about having sex with me because we weren’t married. We had met online through a dating site that was very proud of its squeaky-clean reputation and the...

I was an aspiring rock star in London. Aspiring, you see. That means still trying, not having accepted defeat yet. I had a full-time job in an off-licence in south-west London, but my band did gigs once a week or so. There was a pub right on the river and we played in the basement. It must have been May or around that time. It was the weekend of the Rugby League Cup Final between two teams from the north of England. We di...

I first met Indy when I Iived in Tobago. That's the only place anyone could have met her, in fact, because she was a local girl who hadn't been around much. She hadn't been around much in any sense, really, because she was twenty and married. Indy was very slim, but not skinny. It was her width that made her slender: narrow shoulders and hips. She was shapely enough from other angles, but when you put your arms around her...

There's an old saying, "If you don't ask you don't get," and it applies to all sorts of aspects of life. I once read an interview with Rod Stewart, at that time one of rock's leading lotharios, in which he revealed a pulling technique he used at parties. Early in the evening, he would start talking to the girl he most fancied and after a few preliminaries he would say, "Would sex be out of the question?" And of course, mo...

As a freelance journalist on a small Caribbean island I’m always looking for ideas. Things to write about in a human-interest, non-investigative way. I don’t dig the dirt, don’t look for trouble, just try to find people and things that readers of local magazines will find interesting. That’s why I was at this press conference at a trade show in a fancy hotel (or resort, as they like to call them here). It was a showcase f...

The Caribbean idyll is a myth promoted by tourism departments and lazy journalists, and eagerly accepted by those shivering in the cold of their North American or European homes. Yes, these islands have lots of sandy beaches and the sun shines most of the time, but if you’re living there, it’s real life with good weather. I marched into the office of the telecoms company that had promised six weeks ago to install my phone...

It’s a common fantasy, the overnighter in a cheap hotel. You can get quite excited, out there in hotel land where no one knows you and you can do as you please, but when the sexual romps don’t materialize, expectations plummet. I was in one of those moods at this place in Fort Lauderdale. It was Sunday night and I had been traveling all day. I checked into the room and had a quick shower, but I didn’t know why; I wasn’t a...

Yelitza had a tiny beauty salon right by the water in the yacht marina. Her customers were a combination of shaggy-haired yachties who had been out in the sun too much and expats who lived in condos in this affluent part of the island. That included me, an itinerant English teacher, rubbing shoulders with people who had fuel bills for their boats bigger than my rent on a studio apartment. Yelitza was Colombian and of Afri...

Normally the well-built blonde with the ponytail had a jogging partner as she pounded around the park on the outskirts of Salzburg. I had seen her a dozen times, although not up close, as she powered along the path looking determined. I was doing an altogether feebler bit of keeping fit, passing the time doing something constructive while I waited for some business to be done here in the Austrian city. I had to be there b...

Six o’clock at the Jolly Roger, down by the beach on this steaming Caribbean island. Evenings started early here, for the benefit of the hordes of middle-aged and older Americans who wanted to eat and be entertained and in bed by ten. There was live music every night and on Tuesdays it was Johnny van Clapton, a Dutchman who had been given the nickname by a bar owner who admired his guitar playing. Johnny had been on the i...

In a small community, in this case, 60,000 people, where you have lived for a long time, using a dating website and focusing on your exact geographical area inevitably means you come across people you know. That’s perfectly natural - you’re all there for the same thing and it’s nothing to worry about, as long as your profile is tasteful and decent. That’s how I see it, anyway, but different personalities see it in differe...

When Tabitha was sixteen, she lost her virginity to Ralph, the head boy of her brother’s all-male school. He wasn’t particularly keen – he was quite happy rummaging around in her knickers and wasn’t expecting to get his dick inside a girl until he went to university, but she more or less insisted. After all, they had been going out together for several months and people assumed they had done it, which was what really matt...