Fifty years ago exactly, on Thursday 8th October 1959, there was a General Election, won by Harold Macmillan's Conservatives. He claimed we'd never had it so good. His Conservatives were slightly to the left of New Labour today in most repects. But I loathed them none the less.

I'm not quite sure where my lifetime hatred of Conservativism came from. Partly, but not entirely, from my father, who was a romantic Liberal. Partly in reaction to the thug thoughtless upper class twits I was at boarding school with. And partly because on the issues of the day - apartheid, nuclear weapons, capital punishment - I instinctively sided with the left.

[Never, though, the Labour Party. They always seemed so statist, pro-bureacratic, limited in their vision. I was a Liberal, and later a libertarian socialist - which, if pushed, is where I would describe myself today - a lonelier position to hold than in the 1970s.]

But back in 1959 I greatly admired a leftwing Liberal candidate who at one stage my dad had thought of marrying (but she was too much of a feminist for him). She sent a letter to my housemaster making up some fake job interview, so I could visit her constituency on the other side of the country, and campaign for her.

Very exciting for me. But I think she might have had a different kind of excitement in mind. A few years later, she seduced two of my friends at University. She enjoyed seducing young men. Then, thinking back to the first days of October 1959, when she woke me a good hour earlier than was absolutely necessary, I realised - not for the last time - I had missed the clues and cues. My heterosexual life could have started there and then, in a Mrs Robinson moment.

So, my god I feel dizzy. This week is the 50th anniversary of my first experience of being a sex object.