We live in a moment of endless, unspoken ‘promises’: Buy this new cologne, and the object of your affection will throw themselves at you on first sniff; Do everything your boss tells you, and domestic bliss and the picket fence will be guaranteed; drink this tasteless protein shake, and you’ll have an enviable Instagram body in no time.

I turned 33 last month. Spectacularly, I might add, at an absurdly glamorous party attended by 150 of my close personal friends. There was cake, and pole dancing and although everything that happened after 2:30am is fairly hazy,

I am a woman who thinks with her body. I spend a great deal of time attending to what makes a body (both mine and maybe yours) feel good, recognising pleasure's capacity to awaken a drive for something more. This is sometimes an act of unlearning - we can know pleasure in far more complex ways than we are taught to imagine.

Something I hear from almost every client is a desire to be with a companion that is also having a great time. Which is fantastic! But over the years I've found that most people are only thinking about sex when they say that and miss the thing that makes these experiences mutually unforgettable. Curious to know what that is?

Everything you ever wanted to know but were too afraid to ask

I’ve always thought offence and lust were closely intertwined. It’s there in the language - we take offence. Acquisitive, hungry, needy. It’s no secret our erotic imaginations are often fired by things that tread the line between offence and propriety.

Formerly sin was made clear to us through religion. It was simple. To paraphrase a recent take: if you aren’t behaving in a manner the church would have disapproved of 500 years ago, are you even living? In the absence of a religious context, we’ve had to reevaluate what we condemn as sinful, along with how we punish those who choose to transgress

He begins by telling me to undress. And the ‘telling’, here, is key. It’s not ‘please could you undress’ but ‘undress.’ Just like that. Stark and simple and commanding. Establishing, with a single word, that he is the one in control: on top. This is the start of the story.

As children, we’re taught it’s rude to stare, the implication being that to look for too long is vulgar, even invasive. “Visibility,” Foucault stated famously, “is a trap,” and it’s a fact now universally accepted that a person is weakened, rendered almost powerless by their having been seen.

You don’t need a degree in psychoanalysis to know we human beings are programmed to want what we cannot have. Denial is its own heat source, a generator of acute, erotic energy. And yet it is more complicated than mere refusal, and can arrive to us in many forms.

One lesson firmly instilled in me by my dashing school music tutor was: even if you make a mistake, never stop playing. As I got older, fumbling my way through various sexual encounters, I realised this was a useful refrain in more situations than simply clarinet recitals. Things go wrong in sex all the time; it doesn’t need to mean the music should stop.

Why is it that the seediest encounters are often the most erotic? This thought struck my mind one night in Berlin, backing my way into a dark, dirty corner of Berghain with a partner, ready to let loose on each other after hours pumping ourselves up on the dance floor.

A someone who enjoys taking their clothes off, I spend rather a lot of time preoccupied with the process itself. I'm intrigued by the power imbued in the ways in which we can make the transition from being fully clothed, to a state of undress. Roland Barthes believed the striptease to be something of a paradox, one "based on a contradiction”

A consequence of this jet-setting is often finding myself alone, in a strange place, with time to kill and nothing but my own imagination to keep me company. Sometimes, I realise I’m less alone than I think; it’s in these moments that chance encounters with strangers occur and these always get my heart beating.