Should I wish to sing, dance or strip naked, should I wish to go down on a stranger or masturbate (not that I would arbitrarily do any of these things – well…), I could do so without fear of censure or misunderstanding. Neither my body nor its functions is considered shocking, unusual or obscene.

From the very outset, there is the easy, wide-ranging conversation of equals and initiates. Swingers may talk openly of things generally considered taboo, but there is much more that simply need not be said. Where the sexual agenda is not hidden, it ceases to be a threat.

This is the principal problem with our post-lapsarian condition. We can no longer play with one another when every unguarded action or word may be interpreted as a sexual signal and sex is taboo. Every encounter, every conversation is political, competitive.

We swingers have no such problem. Sexual signals consist in direct questions – “Will you?” or, in Europe, in tentative caresses. These can be rejected with a word or a shake of the head, invariably without offence given or taken. There may, after all, be a thousand reasons for such rejection, none of them inherently offensive because they are rejections of a specific request at a specific time, not of a whole person.

So it may be ‘Not just now. I don’t feel like it,’ or, ‘You’re very nice, but my partner does not fancy yours. Sorry!’ or ‘Your cock is too big for me,’ or even, ‘Sorry. We don’t play with fat people’, - inoffensive because a personal idiosyncratic preference and because plenty of other people do and will – or, most commonly of all - ‘Look, we really like you, but I think you’ll agree that the chemistry just isn’t there…’