They say that anyone who claims not to masturbate is a liar. They also say that anyone who chooses to write a blog about masturbation is an idiot.

As with most physical acts, when women masturbates they conjure an erotic, sensual aesthetic in which human beings seems at one with a deeper spiritual self. When men masturbate they can only ever look like one thing, and that thing is a monkey.

For many of this current generation of men, masturbation began roughly at 11 o clock on a Friday night with ‘Eurotrash’ on Channel Four. This worked out fine as long as the programme focussed on bare-breasted Swedish models. It was when the action turned without warning to a naked German man pretending to be a dog that the enterprise collapsed a little. A deliberate prank on 13-year olds everywhere?

Like counting to a million, it is always easy to be put off masturbation and have to start again. Hearing your Mother hover the stairs is perhaps the most common cause of this problem.

It was once thought that masturbation would turn us mad or sexually deranged. We now know that, if anything, it ensures the opposite. The best time to masturbate is the same as the best time to have a cigarette: when you realise that you haven’t had one for a while, and no one is around to disapprove.