Lessons Learnt #4 - Setting Yourself On Fire Doesn't Impress Girls

Nor does getting off with other blokes. Or a swift head butt. All of which I have performed in the hopeless pursuit of coitus at some point during the last three years.

The head butt was actually head butts plural, and were it not for a protective layer of beanie, could have resulted in hard time rather than column inches. Worse for wear leaning against a corner of the student's union during the fag end of a Friday night, a beautiful apparition in a blue dress floated towards me smiling. As the drum and bass reached a crescendo, she opened her mouth and said something to me I couldn’t hear - hopefully 'can I buy you a drink on the way to the dance floor?', but more than likely ‘oh my God, do you need a doctor?’.

Either way, my reaction was to undo twenty years of mastering the human working envelope by planting one on her. Amazingly, I got away with that common assault but when she appeared to laugh it off and say something else I couldn’t hear - well, I did it again, didn’t I, causing her to abruptly turn on her heels and storm out of my pathetic life forever.

Kissing my handsome though heavily bearded friend Callum was not the liberating sexual experience it perhaps ought to have been. We were in effect banging our skulls together over the same pretty 2nd year student for whom we hoped to demonstrate our bisexual nonchalance: an image that actually describes the moment quite accurately.

On the wave of a ‘truth or dare?’ type conversation boys start to get girls to do something they can’t get them to do through charm, we puckered up, lent in and thought of England. The resulting clash must have had all the self-assured sexual rhythm of Man’s First Wank, because once we’d pulled apart, pretty 2nd year and her pretty friends had pretty much fucked off.

Setting myself on fire was my punishment for never learning to juggle. Crashing back to someone’s flat after a night out, I found myself in the improbable scenario of being alone, on a bed, with two auburn haired Medical students. As one did a drunken crab on the floor, the conversation turned fruitfully towards party tricks. Probably imaging an exotic menage-a-trois that would no doubt have terrified me into impotency anyway, I declared I was able to light matches off my teeth. Not exactly Darren Brown territory, but you can only work with what you’ve got.

Naturally, the chemical head of the match clung to my bottom lip like a nervous toddler in a supermarket, setting it, and me, temporarily on fire. Having raced into their bathroom to put myself out, I soon stood over the sink, the blister on my mouth sulking to the size of a golf ball as quickly as my pride - and the menage-a-trois – ran off down the plug hole.

If only I had known at these moments that girls simply don’t want a blind drunk, circus trick-performing sex-adventurer - or if they do, then at the very least they want one that’s successful.