coupling at a conference on affective disorders. Her packaging had been corrugated cardboard — although that wasn’t it. Conferences, ah! always his favoured arena of seduction: there was something undeniably arousing, was there not, in the juxtaposition of the rigid squaring of the carpet tiles in the conference suite of a former polytechnic and the rippling pliancy of flesh? Between the expansive tedium of the plenary session and the bolting down of Lambrusco minutes later? Between the buttoned-up formality of introductions and the she-be-lying across the blue-and-bluer-striped duvet of a student study-bedroom? Cheerily looking his limpness in the eye, she’d said, Why not try Viagra? And he, struggling to insert the