I’ve been having a lot of typical sex lately. You know, the sort of sex you have when you just fancy some sex but have no particular desire to put a cherry on top. Basic sex. No-frills sex. If exciting and boundary-defining shags are the equivalent of a twelve-course tasting menu, then what I have been doing is eating cheese sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a whole month.

And guess what? It’s brilliant.

I love cheese-sandwich sex to almost exactly the same degree as I love twelve-course fancy sex.

My typical sex

It starts with a suggestion by one or other of us. Not a gentle touch or a barked command, or anything designed to elicit a specific sexual reaction. I’ve had shags that have started with playful sofa-fighting, and ones which I’ve kicked off by simply pulling my knickers down and offering my naked arse to the gentleman in question. Typical sex isn’t like this, it begins much more simply.

“Fancy a shag?”

“Yep.”

There’s a pristine beauty and simplicity to it. It’s not overworked, which means that if the second person doesn’t fancy one they’ll know it’s not the end of the world to decline. Nor is it overly-prescriptive. “Fancy a shag?” leaves you open to developing a particular type of shag if you like. I could respond with “yes, will you fuck me over the bath?” or “no, but I’d love to suck you off while I rub my clit through my knickers.” In short, ‘fancy a shag?’ tells me that you’re horny, and asks if I am too. All the rest is up for grabs.

Once it’s been established that both of us fancy a shag, we touch. Although I’m generally a fan of variety, in this specific scenario, when I am in the ‘typical sex’ mindset, I get off on the predictability of it. He grips me around the waist and immediately slides his hands down to my arse. There’s a delicious familiarity there – the exact size and shape of him is satisfyingly unsurprising. The exact degree to which he squeezes me has been carefully calibrated over years of ‘a bit harder’ and ‘oh God yes that’s it’ until he’s got just the right pressure to get me dripping.

The same familiarity comes, of course, from his dick. I know how quickly it gets hard, what motions will best help it to get there, and exactly how to open this specific pair of trousers (seducing someone new is great fun, but I never seem quite as suave as I’d like because I fumble with unfamiliar trouser openings). His dick has a very specific weight in my hand, and I’m an expert on just how to hold it and squeeze it to ensure that the typical fuck takes its course.

There’s no detour here for blow jobs – I’m describing my typical shag. And typically I don’t have time to take him slowly into my mouth, because we’ll both be too keen to start fucking. So fuck we do.

And the best part is that as soon as we begin, it’s all about the end. This is an ‘everyday’ fuck – something at least as fun and functional as masturbation.

He’ll fuck me with quick, efficient strokes – touching the bits that give him extra shivers through his dick. I’ll push back and squeeze around him so I can feel as much as possible inside me: so that every atom of my cunt is pushing into part of his cock. There’s no pretense that we’re trying to impress each other, or even making an effort to get each other off: we’re doing it because we need to, and because each of us is as keen as the other to feel those first twitching waves of orgasm grip us in the pit of our stomachs.

‘Typical sex’ doesn’t mean ‘boring sex’

It’s a fuck you have because you both need it. It’s even better than wanking because it’s a mutual pleasure, and is therefore sociable: like monkeys picking fleas off each other or you scratching an itch that I just can’t reach on my own. And the moans and ‘oh yes’s and sighs at the end don’t just signal joy or sexual ecstasy – there’s a definite tone of relief. We’ve soothed and satisfied each other.

That’s why I love the everyday fuck. I love it easily as much as I love the special ones, the exciting ones: the ones with extra people or special toys, or words that make me growl with lust. Because while twelve-course meals are undoubtedly exciting, sometimes you just want a cheese sandwich. Something you eat while standing up in the kitchen, dropping crumbs onto the counter and forgetting to put the butter back in the fridge. It’s everyday, it’s typical, it’s nothing fancy, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t delicious.

Autumn is one of the best seasons. Keats wrote of autumn as a season of harvests and fruits and whatnot, but to most people autumn’s delights fall mainly into the ‘Halloween’ or ‘nearly Christmas’ camps.

However, autumn is my favourite season. Partly because I spend most of the summer being uncomfortable in my clothes and yearning for the time when I can wear jeans and a massive hoodie without people staring in the street. But mostly because there are some things about autumn that I find desperately sexy. Here are three of them:

Wet men

I see wet women fetishised all the time – whether it’s the ubiquitous wet T-shirt competition, or that bit in Spiderman where Kirsten Dunst gets a sexy rainy snog in a see-through dress. But when it comes to wet men the only iconic hotness I can think of is that bit in Pride and Prejudice where Mr Darcy emerges glistening from a lake (now available as a statue!).

In short: wet men are underrated. There are not enough pictures of wet men. But now that autumn’s here, the rains cometh. And with the rains come the tousled shaggy locks of scruffy hipster boys, the raindrops glistening on the heads of hot bald guys, the clinging t-shirts on the men who got caught in the rain.

And best of all, the drips of water running in rivulets down their faces and onto their necks, eventually trickling below the collar line and making me want to lick them.

Men in jumpers

This is probably not even sexual. I just fucking love a good jumper. Not a tacky ‘look how ironic I am’ Christmas jumper, but a big, shaggy bury-your-face-in-my-chest jumper. I’d never dictate to a man what clothing he should wear, but I can reveal that despite my aversion to hugs from strangers, I am far more likely to want to press myself up against you if I can guarantee that the hug will feel like falling into bed.

I take it back: it probably is a sexual thing.

Sex to warm up

You know how it is: October rain, a chill breeze blowing through the house. You can either turn the heating on and line the pockets of BigEnergy Co, ensuring fatcat profits for their shareholders and a slightly crapper Christmas present for your Mum this year… or you can fuck to stay warm like the cavemen used to.

I prefer the second option.

Cold hands running over my clothes, feeling almost painfully intrusive when they eventually reach my goosepimpled skin, then the gradual warm up as your hands get hotter and are allowed further down my body. Running my own hands inside your big sexy jumper to feel the heat of your back, your chest, your stomach, and then the moment when they finally get warm enough that I can place them on your dick without you yelping.

The ultimate beauty of autumn sex is that while you’re pounding and I’m straining and gasping and gripping you tight with my legs, neither of us notices the cold. It’s only afterwards that we realise, as you lie panting and hot beside me, and I can feel the droplets of your sweat cool far too quickly on my chest.

I hate olives. In my opinion, these disgusting, overly-flavoursome nuggets of not-food are the best way to ruin a salad. Even so, I am repeatedly told by friends, family, and others who I suspect are getting secret kickbacks from olive farmers, that when I am older I will grow to love them.

Sadly, despite the olive I eat once a year to test whether I’m officially an adult yet, I have failed to start throwing them gaily into my mouth like someone at a posh dinner party.

Why am I banging on about olives? Because, although I still hate them with a passion only usually reserved for mushrooms, there are other things that I have acquired a taste for as I get older. In no particular order, here are a few adult sexual tastes that I’ve acquired, that are far more fun than olives:

Sexy massages

I used to feel the same about massage as I did about tickling: that it was something people were forcing on me in the misguided belief that I’d like it.

Now, at the grand old age of ‘oh shit I’m nearly 30’, I find that having moisturised hands pummeling my back and shoulders is not only nice but borderline orgasmic. The slickness, the power, the feeling of being so utterly cocooned and caressed by someone is delicious. Even more delicious when the massage goes south, and his slippery hands are mainly just lubing up my arse.

Only from someone I love, though – getting any sort of massage from a stranger still brings me out in a cold and unpleasant sweat.

The word ‘panties’

I have no idea why. Perhaps because when I was younger the word sounded too childish. As an almost-woman I was keen to project the image of an adult seductress. But now this dainty word makes me feel ever so slightly younger. It also conjures images of small, candy-coloured scraps of knicker fabric which makes me feel sexy even when the reality is less ‘miss’ and more ‘M&S’.

Spending more than a tenner on bedsheets

I know, it seems profligate. At University I’d have been happy to use the same cheap polyester sheets for an entire term, taking only short breaks to crinkle them a bit when they became too stiff with sex juices.

Now, as a much more mature adult, I find there’s something tingly and sexual about not just clean bedsheets but quality bedsheets. Soft cotton with a hint of fabric softener puts me in mind not just of sex but of the kind of sex I’ve had in hotels. Passionate, filthy, do-it-in-each-corner-of-the-room sex. Sex with bubble baths afterwards, and fresh towels, and occasionally complimentary slippers. Young me didn’t know the joy of this sex: adult me wants to reminisce about it by spending money in John Lewis and constantly loading the washing machine.

Sober sex

Naturally sober sex has always been good. I’m just not sure I realised how good, until I hit 25 or so. The older I get the more frustrated I am with my drunk self for not being able to fully appreciate every stroke, slap and sigh of a really decent fuck.

Drunk sex can be fun: giggly and uninhibited. And the slight spinning of the room makes you feel like you’re fucking in a fairground. But with sober sex you can feel every stroke, squeeze at just the right moments, and above all avoid falling off the bed.

I am not very sexy on weekday mornings. Not just in the sense that I have hair like a Muppet in a wind tunnel and breath like a Wetherspoons toilet, but also that if anyone touches me first thing in the morning I’m liable to cry. When my alarm goes off and I force my eyes open, the last thing I want is to have my tits touched: I will leap 20 feet into the air and run to the shower before you can say “I’m late I’m late I’m late.”

Life is exhausting and unfair. The fact that morning is usually when boys have their hardest, easiest erections is a cruel slap in the face: I feel ungrateful for saying ‘no’ to something so amazing, but at the same time… it’s 7 am, for fuck’s sake. I just want to drink my coffee, have a shower, and get the hell to work. Of course later in the day when my brain’s stopped caring how many minutes I have before I’m officially late, I feel like an idiot for wasting a lovely opportunity.

So I have to make opportunities elsewhen:

Just after work

I know people who change their clothes as soon as they get home, even if they don’t wear a suit to the office. The transition between work and home is an important way to strip the stresses and strains of the day from your body, shout “fuck that for a laugh”, and put on your relaxation face.

For me, post-work sex serves much the same purpose. I don’t want a guy to come home, sit on the sofa, and turn on the TV to wind down. Ideally I want him to come home, growl about what a shit day he’s had, then unzip his flies so I can sink eagerly to my knees and suck the stress out of him. If that fails, I’ll settle for a quickie up against the wall in the hallway, taking occasional glimpses of us in the mirror as he grabs, twists, pulls, and generally messes up the hair that looked so professional earlier.

During the evening

Sex has never, for me, been naturally associated with bedtime. Perhaps it’s down to my formulative teenage years, when the sex I had necessarily happened between 5pm and my 9pm curfew. I couldn’t sleep at my boyfriend’s house, ergo sex was an early-evening thing. As an adult, when sleeping with new people, I’d always prefer to have sex before we go to the pub, if at all possible, meaning I won’t be stuck trying to get a night bus at 3am after an unnecessarily long pre-sex preamble.

What I’m saying is that I like sex in the evening. I’d much rather be taken roughly over the coffee table before we watch Grand Designs than led gently to bed after Question Time for a half-hearted ‘I can barely keep my eyes open’ shag.

Evening sex is excellent – it inspires me to think more about when we might be able to fit a quick fuck in, and keeps me constantly on edge. I spend a lot of time appraising the boy as he sits hunched over his laptop on the sofa, cock visible through the thin fabric of his pyjamas. Coquettishly (but not that subtly) leaning up against him, rearranging my t-shirt so it shows enough cleavage to tempt him into putting an arm around me and squeezing.

The best thing about evening sex is that it doesn’t tend to become routine. Sex at bedtime can easily become part of my day in the same way as brushing my teeth or taking the bins out. Whereas evening sex can happen any time, anywhere – outside the bathroom, on the sofa, in the spare room as one of us ambushes the other while they’re putting away the laundry. Or, in my favourite scenario, bent over the bottom of the bed as I’m changing the duvet cover. Hands folded in the bed linen, gripping onto the fabric of the sheet as he pulls my jeans down just far enough, unzips his flies, and fucks me functionally until my legs give out. A fuck with just a few grunts, the feeling of him pumping spunk deep into my cunt, followed by a quick clean-up before I get back to the evening’s chores.

At the weekend

Because at the weekend I never have to worry about where I have to be and when. I have more time to do the things I need to do, so the things I want to do get more of a look in.

At the weekend I can wake up to him playing with my nipples and I can moan and play back, knowing that if I’m still tired we can go to sleep afterwards. At the weekend I can take my time when I suck his cock – edging him closer to orgasm then pulling away, grinning and watching him twitch with frustration. We can fuck in different ways, enjoying the pressure, the view, and the solid, tight feeling of each of our favourite positions. He can take his time to fuck me slowly but firmly, each stroke a teasing slap against my aching cunt as I will him to go faster, harder, to let me squeeze myself around his dick.

In the morning during the week we’re both desperate to get to work, and it matters if we don’t make it. At the weekend we’re desperate to come, but it doesn’t matter when we do it, as long as we both do.