My first love was a ginger-haired boy. So was my second. And my third... Heather Chalmers on her particular brand of repetitive strain injury

THE FIRST time it happened, I was just 18 years old, home for the hols from uni. I'd gone out clubbing with my schoolfriends, to the same old place full of all the same old drunken bores. Then, I saw a boy I'd never seen before. My chromosomes ached as they coiled and uncoiled, desperate to wrap around this strange boy's DNA.

It was the 1980s, so there was nothing unusual about this boy's getup and garb: the sandy-gingery hair, shaved at the sides and bleached in scrubby patches up top. The army shirt with its arms sawn off, the studded belt slung postpunkwise down his hips. We got talking, this boy and I, and I remember his details as if I was eating them right now. Pale skin with freckles on it. A t-shirt under the army blouson, worn maybe to hide the chest-hairs which matted up way out the top of the t-shirt's neck.

He was the first gingermouse. Many others came after him, scampering round my erotic imagination, like hamsters on a wheel. That pale, freckly colouring, with tufty hair on the body and not that much on the head. And something cold and acerbic in there somewhere, like the studs on my first love's belt. Steel-rimmed specs will do it, so long as they are not posh ones, but the sort you'd have got in a communist country or from the NHS. Last year, I walked into a party and was entranced by a Cheshire gingermouse smile. It was a smile with a shadow underneath it: bridgework, which nothing but a metal-detector would notice. A metal-detector, and me.

Me and my first love turned out not at all to be made for each other, although we have managed to stick it out as long-lasting friends. I had a drink with him a few weeks ago, in between his children's teatime and putting them to bed. He's getting bald and a bit pot-bellied, which is something this eddy in the gene-pool seems prone to doing quite young. But he still has his freckles and his steely look, and he still wears t-shirts with a tangle of gingery chest-hairs pushing their way through the top. My double helix uncoiled in delicious agony, then he went home to preside over bathtime, and my double helix quietly snapped shut.

That's nice, believe me, compared to what happened with the lager-fixated gingermouse, or the exceedingly boring g-mouse engineer. (Engineer, girders, Mmm.) Being but a type-fixated lover type, all I can say really is, I may not know much about true love and good loving, but at least I know what I like.