Before long, I discovered masturbation—which proved that my choral failure was not a total loss. Soon, with the help of my memory of Evie, I began to devise a considerable array of sexual fantasies to support the cause. From then on, no female was entirely safe from my mind, which certainly made life much more bearable when I was being criticised or nagged. When, one night, such fantasies extended to Rosely, I was sure I had attained pure genius, and who is to say I wasn’t right. Maybe I was good at it and maybe not—it didn’t matter because there was never anyone else around to tell me how I was going wrong. Life, I knew, didn’t get any better than that.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-Lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita…
… You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style…
Lolita was a film I wasn’t allowed to see, but I easily upstaged that by secretly reading the book by Nabokov, one of the finest in the language, which plunged to depths way below the scope of cinema, even that of Stanley Kubrick who was at the point of making one of the greatest movies ever. The book was filthier, crueller and the girl was twelve, not fourteen as in the movie. I loved every word of it, even though I wondered about the spotty girls around the neighbourhood and found it impossible to believe anyone could have written so romantically about them. Then, on page 132, after all that huffing and puffing of the build up, Humbert and Lo are in the sack at last.
Frigid gentlewomen of the jury! I had thought that months, perhaps years, would elapse before I dared to reveal myself to Dolores Haze; but by 6 she was wide awake, and by 6.15 we were technically lovers. I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me…
and then, what might be the most disappointing line in all literature.
However, I shall not bore my learned readers with a detailed account of Lolita’s presumption.
What about the poor unlearned readers, Vladimir, you bastard! Yes, that’s right. Lolita is not a dirty book at all, but a rather prudish one in its strange way. Still, it was very compelling and erotic and I did carry on, despite this bitter body blow. And it was worth it—the final scenes when he encounters her, sensibly married and pregnant to a dull young man, suburban and ordinary, and still lavishing her with his romantic love that is ridiculously inappropriate in the circumstances, is one of the best in all modern literature. It’s a great book. Very cheeky and rude and witty, and designed to utterly thwart budding pornographees such as I was at the time. A great joke. Even callow me laughed.