Of course, it's practically de riguer for autobiographies including a chunk of adolescent boyhood to talk about masturbation. This is usually accompanied by earthy accounts of place, frequency, method, lust object and guilt. And often, it seems, desired partners have a starring role. That's not my experience. My fantasies were deeply romantic, in all the ways that an adolescent boy would die rather than admit. In this, hormones played a kind of painfully intensifying role, rather than releasing a surge of sexual urgency.

My romantic fantasies, circa 1971, involved companionship, affection, fun, and holding hands with a girl I liked, who liked me. This strand of my psychological life remained separate, at least at a conscious level, from the physical experiences and experiments of puberty and adolescence. When I fell in love with one (usually unreachable) girl after another, the motivation and the end were social rather than sexual. Of course, the hand holding of my early fantasies developed, in actual relationships, into more - into as much as I could make happen, I suppose. So my hormones were firing. But I never used my girlfriend, or (more often) the unattainable object of my romantic desires, as a masturbation aid. And it wasn't as if I still didn't know how the physical connected with the emotional. I think I was repulsed by the idea of sexual objectification of someone I wanted to love, and didn't want to imagine sex with someone I didn't care for.

How long did this last? Well, when the two strands began to touch I really was in love, and the fantasies were being shared. But that wasn't early and I still feel a kind of disconnection with accounts of adolescent boys masturbating to fantasies of the sexiest girl in school. Did I just have a sheltered upbringing, and hold religious views that repressed my natural sexual urges into sanitized relationship-oriented desires? Or is this progression, from the physical-stimulus strand and the desire-for-loving-relationship strand, into a single love-and-sex strand, something that happens at different rates in different lives?

With the turn of my inner life towards love, my pre-teen fantasies fell away, but the acute sensitivity remained, and where I was previously afraid of criticism, now I was afraid of rejection. So it was that to act on my desires meant leaping over a wall of self-doubt and shyness. Usually the wall was too high, and my infatuations were imprisoned. This, I think, is a fairly common teenage experience.