So I was lying on the sofa watching The Dish, relaxing after entertaining, cooking-for and disposing of a couple of friends and their 7 year-old sprog – American-style Cottage Cheese Pancakes with Maple Syrup, Tea, chat, and a sampler of UK farmhouse and European cheeses – and pondering maybe a nice bottle of Cab-Sav, when the phone rang.

It was Bridget, calling from Italy, and she had a wicked I’m a naughty little girl tone in her voice.

“I’ve just had a shag.” she said. You could tell that she was grinning with the achievement of it all.

“Oh fuck” I thought aptly, however caught myself in time to ask “With whom? M?” – meaning the guy over whom she’s been obsessing and blowing hot-and-cold over for some weeks. “No, with this gorgeous 28 year-old guy who I met the other day. It was more half-a-shag actually…”

I choose to ignore this hook and not seek clarification, preferring instead to check my greater concern that she’s OK in body and mind. It caps a weird week which has included non-stop work at the office, editing homemade training videos during the wee hours of the night, and riding my motorbike flat-out along starlit high-downland roads when returning from Halloween night, which was spent doing security and giving Astronomy lectures to visitors at a prehistoric stone circle overseen by three witches.

Yes, really. No they weren’t dancing naked around the fire. There was plenty of tea and chocolate however, and I’d be a bit dubious of assigning the traditional roles of maiden, mother and crone to the trio, as it could get you into serious trouble…

In other news I’ve stripped carpet tiles from my kitchen, recycled 50lbs of old paperwork, cleared a shedload of old e-mail, rebuilt my laptop with two consecutive revs of Solaris, and replaced the hard disk in my hemispherical G4 iMac with one that is 4x the size and nearly twice the speed of the original.

With all of this stress, complexity, polarity, and given a long period of celibacy – largely self-imposed, or at least it’s my own damn fault – I believe that I can be forgiven not wanting much in the way of gory details of Italian shags of female friends.

Admittedly I’ve been saying that she needed onesuch for considerable time, but that’s another matter entirely.

I wanted to say: “You’ll be fine. Relax, it’s not such a big deal. Enjoy the glow. I envy you the excitement. I hope it works out and doesn’t queer things with M just in case that’s a long-term thing. Please don’t let it all get on top of you to the point where you’re stressing about it, but I recognise that this is a faint hope.”

Actually I said: “Congratulations! Hugs! I’m hanging up now! Bye!”

The Cabernet Sauvignon actually is rather nice.