At about nine o’clock, most people are gathered outside in the garden, smoking loose roll-ups or cheap cigarettes that come in packets of ten. The supply of supermarket vodka has been depleted and someone’s started a whip-round so they can run to the shop to top up our stock with some clear, petrol-tasting cider and another pouch of tobacco.

While college-age guests scrabble for booze, the party host is surveying the damage and praying they’ll get it all cleared up before their parents arrive home on Sunday afternoon. Inevitably, as the drunken groping escalates to second or third base, one or other of us asks the host:

“Mate, which room is the sex room?”

“Front living room. But there’s four other people in there at the moment so you might want to take a blanket or something.”

“Ta.”

Sex parties that aren’t sex parties

There’s a huge difference between deliberate swinging and the kind of sex parties that my nostalgic self longs for. Parties where the main aim is to get drunk, but the side show involves hustling your giggling other half across a room full of silently copulating others – others too horny to wait until everyone’s gone home or fallen asleep. Others who are used to fucking in front of people because – hey! We’re eighteen! Life’s really fucking short so let’s not go short on fucking!. I miss those parties.

The casual ease with which you’d step over a friend, her legs twitching with pleasure as her latest squeeze buried his face beneath a blanket and deep into her crotch. The ‘sorry’s as you’d make your own room in a tiny sliver of space – feeling not just your partner’s eager hands but the clammy heat from couples either side of you.

At one party, I fucked my boyfriend on one of those deep tub-shaped armchairs. The duvet spread over the top of the chair provided a vaguely private tent, and I slipped my knickers to one side and sat down on his dick, burying my head in his shoulder to muffle my heavy breathing. Raising myself only ever-so-slightly with each stroke, I fucked an inch or so at a time, until his cock was swollen with desperation and his toes curled – visible by everyone else as they stuck out of the bottom of the duvet. It took me twenty minutes of this slow, controlled fucking to come, and when I did, the small shudder of our makeshift tent gave no indication of just how amazing it felt.

Not swinger’s parties

I miss this stuff as an older person – the sex you have to have right now because you’re so horny. The knowledge that there’s a room upstairs you can sneak off to, and still hear the chatter and laughter from the party downstairs. The quick, urgent, silent fuck you share on a pile of coats in the spare room, or over the bath, or – best of all – in a room with other people. All of you groping and kissing and fucking – not sharing each other, but sharing the experience.

I’ve had it once as an adult – a late drunken new year’s party with so many guests missing last trains that they spilled over into my bedroom. Mates I loved (and had probably fucked at one point or another) giggling and groping on the floor, maintaining casual conversation with me and my boy.

“Are you fucking?” One asked me, halfway through a casual conversation.

“Hmm?” I replied, clenching my cunt around the tip of his dick, which he’d inched slowly, cautiously inside me.

I made a quick shuffle that could be passed off as rearranging the bedclothes, and pushed my arse backwards to take the full length of him into me. He coughed to try and cover up his satisfied sigh.

I’ve been to swinger’s clubs, but never a party that’s explicitly labelled a ‘swinger’s party’ – the idea of group sex is deeply hot, but there’s something about the explicit planning inherent in the whole thing that turns me off. Perhaps it’s all the impromptu fucks I had as a youngster that have killed the idea for me, but sex parties seem far more fun when the ‘party’ comes first.

I don’t want to bare all and stride purposely through a group of likeminded people, picking which of them I might invite to join me in a slippery tangle of limbs. I want something spontaneous to happen when some of us are horny enough – no swapping or swinging, just a mutual desire to fuck, and an aching need to do it right now. Not because others are there, but despite it.

I want to slowly lower myself onto his dick, and have him stifle a gasp. I want him to work eager hands into my bra and pinch my nipples when he thinks no one else can see. To whisper and giggle and fumble in the dark.