SAMANTHA'S DIARY: FRIDAY, 29 NOVEMBER: BAD SEX AT THE IRISH CLUB

The waiters paraded their sausages across the room, held aloft on silver trays, waiting for us to pick up a stick, prick them gently and slowly place them in the moist, warm holes in the front of our faces. In the palatial drawing room of the Irish Club on Eaton Square, round after round of Yorkshire's finest were being consumed in the name of Bad Sex. Post-prick groans of satisfaction reverberated off the ceiling. Well- bred young ladies shrilled every time someone said "I didn't know you were coming." And bullish older men, sucking feverishly on the free Hamlet cigars, proclaimed the Literary Review's Bad Sex Awards to be a great idea, quickly followed by the disclaimer: "Not that I know anything about the subject of course." Narf Narf.

The audience had expected Stephen Fry to come, as it were, but as Auberon Waugh politely explained, "He's tied up in Toronto." Instead we were compensated with the actress Anna Chancellor. A woman most famous for her portrayal of Duckface in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Anna is about to embrace the spirit of this evening's occasion by flying to Uganda to make a lesbian movie with Sophie Ward. She presented the winner, Nicholas Royle, with a sculpture devised by Professor R M Posner said to represent sexual intercourse in the 1950s - a woman and a dog, prone, with their legs in the air. It wasn't just the sex that was bad. Royle had beaten off stiff competition; Arundhati Roy narrowly missed bagging the Bonker as well as the Booker with the delightful image of: "Her nut-brown breasts (that wouldn't support a toothbrush) against his ebony chest ... His hands on her haunches (that could support a whole array of toothbrushes) to let her know how much he wanted her..." Edwina Currie's entry from the autobiographical nugget, She's Leaving Home, was a strong favourite with a sequence that included the immortal Tory line: "Whatever we do, it's not dirty." While Vikram Chandra's Love and Longing in Bombay got straight to the safe sex nub of the matter with: "When she looked up her face was blurred, her eyes hazy from wine. `Condom?' she said. `Condom?' "

Nicholas Royle thanked his editor Richard Beswick - who promptly left the building - and lest we imagined otherwise, he assured us that none of the sex scenes in The Matter of the Heart were autobiographical. "My wife Kate forbade me to write any sex scenes between any characters that resemble either her or me," he explained. Kate wasn't on hand to reveal how bad things really might have been. As it is, the woman clearly has a lot to put up with: "Yasmin writhed on the bed, making a noise somewhere between a beached seal and a police siren ... And then he was there ... speeding up gradually to gain a rhythm until he was punching smoothly in and out of her like a sewing machine."

The applause for Royle's book was unanimous, except for Heathcliff, the office dog, who, according to his owner, couldn't see anything wrong with the seal sex scene. The pop impresario Malcolm McLaren just stared. Rowena from the Erotic Print Society was on a subscription drive for her fruity new magazine. It was, she said, "For men of a certain age who appreciate a calmer kind of titillation." Christopher Silvester, 40 next birthday, declared that he was still game; only last week he'd donned leather vest and panties for the Rubber Ball. As the band struck up an Irish gig, the crowd swayed like an electrified jellyfish. The young man to my left grabbed his partner, whirled her round and announced to the room: "We've never had bad sex, have we darling?" There was a momentary pause before his paramour answered. "You might not have done, but I certainly have."