In my teens I was awkward, gawky and geeky: larger than my class-mates, with long hair and NHS spectacles. I felt ugly. I was shy. Uncomfortable in my skin and in the world.

My mother had given me a huge dose of sexual inhibition.

I am not sure whether it was an inheritance like a gene, or an inoculation like a flu jab. Talking to a cousin earlier this year, it appears that my mother was a woman who enjoyed sex. I never got that impression from her. I was given the impression that sex was one of the shorter straws drawn by a wife, something that one did for the sake of the man you married, not because the thought of him made you go weak at the knees and made fire flare in your belly. On the other hand talking about sex to your children is profoundly embarrassing, so maybe that was it.

By my late teens I was cuter and prettier than I realised (or indeed than I can realise now, looking back) sweetly innocent and shy. It was a horrible time.

I have always had the need to understand. To understand how and why and what and when. This need to understand, in particular the need to understand the alienation of myself from myself, this arrival of a separate sexual being within me, led me to books. I was - as I said - geeky.

I read about sex. I read everything I could lay my hands on.

I started out with the bodice ripping novels about an 18th Century heroine called Angelique. I moved on to 'Lolita', with a disappointment in having to plough my way through pages and pages of detailed prose, which had none of the details I needed; to a novel about prostitution in Victorian England which I found in my brother's room, (and which provided fuel for my most private fantasies for years, and quite probably some of his); to the erotica of Anais Nin, which I read fidgeting on a stool in Blackwells in Oxford, too young to buy erotica but with a need to read it too urgent to let me put the book down.

My sexuality was something awkward, something like an extra limb that I didn't know what to do with. I didn't know how to flirt. I didn't know how to cope if someone flirted with me. I didn't know if I fancied boys or girls, (now I know I can fancy either if the time and the place are right). I was scared: scared of boys for sure, and probably scared of myself though I didn't know it. And very, very afraid of ignorance.

I read and read and read.

I found a copy of 'Fear of Flying'; reading it with equal excitement and horror. (These days I know I need context; the zipless **** seems to me to be rather a dull way to have sex). I read 'Lady Chatterley' and discovered that sex in the head was a Bad Thing. 'Maurice' is still the only E.M. Forster I have got all the way through.

While I was doing my A levels one of my class-mates paid me the biggest compliment possible at that time. She said: 'I can't tell if you are a virgin or not; you play your cards too close to your chest'. I thought my virginity was tattooed across my forehead. She had no idea that the cards I hid so carefully were all jokers.

I explored sapphic fiction starting with 'The Well of Loneliness', which painted such a bleak view of lesbian life in the 1920s that I finally threw the book out (but not for 14 years or so). I wondered if gender was a route to understanding sexuality, so I read Jan Morris's book 'Conundrum'. I read Ursula Le Guin's book 'The Left Hand of Darkness' about a world of hermaphrodites. I read Heinlien for the sex.

And so to university; burdened by ignorance and virginity. It was both more awkward and less awkward to be a virgin there. Less awkward because as time went by the assumption was that no-one was still a virgin and it became less of an open issue. More awkward because I most definitely was a virgin, and I felt more and more out of step, out of place, and out of sync with myself.

I read Angela Carter and Ian McEwan. I read Mary McCarthy's 'The Group' about young and well educated American college students, much like myself in that they were confused by sex, completely unlike myself in that they were actually getting some. I had my horizons broadened by Nancy Friday's survey of women's sexual fantasies, which put me to sleep on lonely nights. I not only knew the rhyme about Eleanor Glynn and the tiger skin, I had read the book. I read the bonk-busters of the early 1980s like 'Princess Daisy' and 'Scruples'. When all else failed, I read Jilly Cooper.

By this time I knew a lot about sexuality. It would have been hard not to. I knew a lot about perversion. (Now that is a word I haven't heard or even thought in a long time). I knew about homosexuality and heterosexuality; I knew about transexuality and transvestism; I not only knew about sadism and masochism, I could tell you who the men were who gave their names to the terms. I had read a story about a man who kept Napoleon's penis in a jar; stories about contortionists and fire-eaters and other people half way between here and there.

I had reached an awareness of the richness, diversity and exotic complexities of human sexuality.

I was not, by this time, completely inexperienced. I had kissed and cuddled. I had not only fumbled fully clothed, I knew that the term for this was 'bundling'. I had seen and been in bed with a number of men (boys really, bless 'em all) but none of them had got very far, poor dears. I was, in fact, a prick-tease, but a prick-tease through gawkiness awkwardness and powerless fear, not through malice or spite. I had been on the receiving end of cunnilingus, but hadn't come. I wore a green silk slip of my grandmother's, without a bra underneath it; I wore a black velvet jacket of my aunt's on top; and I had no idea how lovely I was.

But I still felt like an imposter in the land of the sexual beings; my sexuality invalidated by inhibition.

And then, one day, in my third year, I was walking across the Cathedral green when I had a private epiphany. My very own realisation of the truth on the road to Damascus.

It was ok.

I was ok.

My awkwardness, my inhibition, my inexperience, my confusion and my fear were all ok.

They formed a sexuality as valid as any other. It was an acceptable place to be. I was a sexual being at a particular point on my a journey.

Three weeks later the green slip did its work, and I went out and got laid.