Let's have a Jacuzzi and talk about life

The Evening began, as they do, with drinks at one of those grand Pall Mall gentlemen's clubs, and ended, as they do, at nine o'clock the next morning in a billionaire playboy's Jacuzzi.

The gentlemen's club chap is in the same line of business as me, but a lot richer. A lot. Perhaps that's because, after a few drinks and a spot of dinner, he went home and wrote his column and got a good night's sleep while I went home and found a message on the answering machine saying, "Why not come and join us for a drink?" So eight hours later there I was, in the Jacuzzi with the billionaire playboy and... and nobody, in fact. Just us.

It had started off so promisingly as we trooped into the billionaire playboy's luxury Belgravia residence, me and him and someone in the music business and a beaming innocent who had installed the global navigation system in the billionaire playboy's yacht or jet or helicopter or bloody Jacuzzi - God knows which because I wasn't listening.

You wouldn't have listened, either, because accompanying us, like something out of an H M Bateman cartoon, was a gleaming troupe of nubilia. Any one of them could have single-handedly enslaved a synod or brought down a regime; oddly enough, the effect was slightly diluted en masse: you didn't know quite where to feast your eyes, nor exactly how many of them there were.

So we drank Dom Perignon and chatted to the girls and they began to thin out a bit so one could get a grip on how many there were, which was: more than enough. So we drank some Roederer Cristal and chatted some more and then they began to thin out a bit more, which was alarming but not too alarming, and in any case Young Love was in bloom: the diffident navigation chap had been utterly captivated by the most nubile of the nubilia, and, astonishingly, she seemed to have been captivated by him too. I suppose it was because he was shy and innocent and nice and seemed a bit bewildered and looked as though he needed mothering; but there she was, reclining on a chaise longue in one of those cobweb silk dresses like a petticoat, and there he was, kneeling at her feet; and there they were, captivating each other. Which is when I started to think of Mrs Anne Atkins, the Daily Telegraph agony aunt.

You'll know about Mrs Atkins: the vicar's missus who went on Thought for the Day and said something to the effect that homosexuality was inevitably, absolutely and invariably bad and naughty and terribly terribly wrong, and if God had chosen to inflict upon you the awful curse of being a beastly homo, then your only option was to offer up your affliction to Jesus as a sort of sacrifice.

The Daily Telegraph immediately seized upon this, rubbing their hands in glee (they must get the stuff delivered in huge tubs, like catering Stork) and hired Mrs Atkins as their new agony aunt. It was a strikingly novel approach, her repertoire of advice, from the columns I have read, being confined to: "Leave it alone or it will drop off", "Pull yourself together or God will get you" and "No".

Doubtless this spreads comfort and reassurance in the venial shires, but I couldn't help remembering the days when Mrs Atkins lay on my chaise longue and I knelt at her feet, worshipping her.

She wasn't Mrs Atkins, then. She was Anne Briggs, the headmaster's daughter at King's Choir School in Cambridge. I was an undergraduate and my heart yearned for her. She played the harp. She had great big blue eyes and yellow hair. She came round for tea, her presence imparting an intense erotic charge to the Fitzbillie's chocolate cake, like a nimbus. I spent a month in Harlech one summer, playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Mrs Atkins was Viola then, and we all slept in an old schoolhouse. All that month I lay awake for hours each night, quivering in the delight of knowing that with every inspiration I was sharing her sleeping breath.

And now she's in the Telegraph, a monitory fundamentalist, saying no. There's her picture. I'd swear to it. Still beautiful, still saying no. Then I looked at the avionics engineer adoring his beautiful girl, and I thought: 20 years from now, what will she have become?

One of the other nubilia plucked at my sleeve. "That's sweet," she said. "Let's give them a treat." So we went upstairs and filled the billionaire playboy's Jacuzzi, instilling the water with rare oils and costly essences of spikenard, vanilla and musk. We adjusted the lighting. We waited for the steam to clear from the ceiling mirrors. Then we went downstairs.

The room had more or less cleared. Just the billionaire playboy and the couple by the chaise longue. "We have run you a Jacuzzi," we said. "Never mind that," they said; "we are going home. It's 8am." "Blimey," said my accomplice, putting her coat on.

The billionaire playboy stared at me disconsolately. "Don't know how that happened," he said, "but ... look, you're not one of those bisexuals, are you?" "No," I said. "Me neither," he said, "and there's no point in wasting the hot water. Let's have a Jacuzzi and talk about life."

We sat in the Jacuzzi but couldn't think of much to say about life. My mind had gone completely blank. Like opening the door on an empty room. I suppose if I were Mrs Atkins the emptiness would be full of God, like packing material, but as it was, I rather liked it. There was room to breathe. I had been granted a moment as an utterly shallow person, and it was lovely. Then a cat fell into the water and clawed its way frantically across my stomach to the other side, the billionaire playboy laughed so much that he slipped beneath the surface and got a lungful of bubbles, and I wondered what Mrs Atkins would say if she could see me now. Perhaps she would set God on me. I lurched blearily home, through the office workers, in a cloud of spikenard, vanilla and humiliation, wondering whether perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps Mrs Atkins, snug in her doubt-free vicarage, had been right all along. Perhaps the answer to life is: Just Say No. !