Readers Problems Answered II

Dear Mr Henry James,

I can never get my boyfriend to climax through oral. We have a great sex life, but it is very frustrating that I can't seem to ever make him come "on demand". We have tried various positions and even stuff like costumes and role-play. But every time it's the same. He has to end up wanking himself off. Is there another way I might stimulate him? A friend suggested a parsnip up the anus. What is your advice?

Dan Bender,
Potters Crouch

Henry James writes: It need hardly be said that, notwithstanding the tendency of what are often termed "physical relations" to, after the inevitable hiatus enjoyed at cross purposes naturally, achieve a more or less agreeable plateau of platonic equability, the universal tendency of all things toward dissipation and non-energetic stasis did, try though he may to shun the evidence of experience, in the end prevail and consume. The embracing of which had, all to often, not been gratifyingly or instinctively reckoned without, in so many terms, the null and or voidest of the many bewitching indecencies at which his flesh might have shrunk.

Dear Sir,

I had a drunken threesome with my manager and his secretary at our works Christmas party, in the hotel toilets, while my husband was doing the quiz. Now I feel terrible and can't sleep. I can't get the image of my manager's flab jiggling as he rogered the secretary while I sat on her face. I feel so dirty and desperate, I have thought about an overdose. Should I confess to my husband and beg for forgiveness?

Stella Glass,
Chorlton-Cum-Hardy

Henry James writes: It was with a sense of, in her own terms, remarkable not quite nothing that she strained, in the not quite miasma of her undone shriving-off, toward that dimly perceived, though most definitely desired, eventuality whose very blurred loomings had, not more than 48 hours before, elicited such a foreboding of undeveloped feelings that, in the potential event, she had almost found a possible friend in the not quite darkness, the almost twilight of these her unwonted imaginings. Whether it be best to, as it were off-handedly, not let the advancing prepossession alert her, she could not be sure, far less definitely so much as nay-say, such a profoundly subtle - but no less signal - faintly-discerned nebula of awareness. But what might that signify to a, for her, less conspicuous answer to a given question of honour?

Dear Henry James Problem Pages,

This year all the family are coming round to our house for Christmas. I am 43 and my partner is 52. We both have children from previous marriages. I have eight and six are still at home with us. My partner has six, four of whom are coming over. My partner also has three teenagers from another relationship and his ex says they have to come too as she is going to visit her mother in Swanpool to deliver a new mongoose in person. I suffer from knees but am still expected to do all the cooking and organise bedding etc. I am worried sick and becoming flatulent through stress. My partner never does a hand's turn but just keeps saying it will all be fine. I feel like a failure because we forgot to buy Christmas crackers, and they're all coming tomorrow night. I can't face it. What can I do?

Joan Darque,
Ramsbottom

Henry James writes: It increasingly occurred to her as befitting his elusiveness, which was a part of his, what seemed to her to be most dominatingly present, tangible influence that, within the ever-widening sphere of influence of these newly-flowering circumstances she ought, no less than anything to the detriment of so liberal a sense of unwilling rectitude, be the more chastened for not being worthy of an interior punishment the sentencing to which no person had ever quite seemed worthy enough not to bestow. Such a benefactor was - and it was often now her unhappy fate to accommodate an uneasy consciousness of no less insistent encroaching misgivings on the question, as she defrosted this gigantic turkey or clutched with lifeless fingers the opaque numbness of these glittering baubles - hardly to be accorded the honour of so unspoken a sense of dubiety in no other regard than that of the doubtful shapes in the firegrate as he snored in his chair in front of Coronation Street. And any regret must, it was plain, be vouchsafed among what were now merely imagined vicissitudes, but must soon become the very warp and weft of forced glees and balked-at unspoken chasms.