So, as this year comes to a close, it seems the right time to get nostalgic and misty-eyed about the past.

Today I am looking a long way back to days of innocence, when sex was something everyone else seemed to be doing. In fact there are times, in drought periods, when I still think this is the case!

I am going back to my student days. DSM lost her virginity on Saturday, 2nd November 1991, aged 18 and a bit. Rather late for someone in those days. But I documented the whole episode.

He was a guy on my course who was 25 – certainly not my first love, but he was experienced and made me laugh. We had been round to a friend’s house, watched some videos, drank Guinness, and then walked back to his house which he shared with his parents.

I noted that it was pouring down with rain and his mum had to lend me some of her clothes so mine could dry – maybe it was the sight of me in his mum’s jogging bottoms that got him going…

I remember him asking if I wanted to “make love” which sounds rather archaic now, but I imagine it was his way of easing me into it. There were a few thrusts while I just lay there motionless, not knowing what I should be doing.

My rambly afterthoughts were: “Don’t know if I chose the right time for this to happen. Feel a real slag. I like xxx but I don’t love him. I’m no longer a virgin. It was OK but didn’t enjoy it that much. He probably didn’t either as I didn’t know how to do it right.”

So, what is probably a momentous occasion in any girl’s life, took place in a bedroom with green walls, covered in posters of Sisters of Mercy, Fields of the Nephilim and New Model Army, with his parents sat downstairs watching TV. And the uncertainty afterwards has followed me ever since – except now the questions are different.

It has gone from ‘was this the right thing to do ‘to ‘did he think my arse, belly and boobs looked hideous’, ‘did he enjoy it at all’ and ‘were we so noisy that we woke the kids’.

To my 18-year-old self, who seemed to spend most of 1991 flitting between different men and questioning everything, I would say: “Just get over it – it has happened now and will get better, although with some people it’s never going to be that good. Plus, you don’t think your body is that good now, but you are the most bloody gorgeous you will ever be in your life. When you are thirty-ahem-ahem you will be wishing you resembled your 18-year-old self and not the saggy, wobbly old sack of spuds you will become – so work it, girl!”