I was thirteen when I got my hands on my first porn mag. Unlike most kids my age, who were limited to the pages that weren’t stuck together, mine was brand new. In fact, I was its first owner. Ownership isn’t quite accurate though, as it is generally something that precedes either exchange or inheritance. I stole my first magazine from a man named Raj.

Raj was the proprietor of my local newsagents for which I used to deliver newspapers in exchange for a mean eight pounds a week. It was the crusty kind of newsagents where you always had to check the sell by date, and Raj had a similar philosophy towards his magazine collection.

Buried beneath the multitude of top shelf material was an erotic fiction forum of sorts, which had been there since the mid-nineties. So one day, feeling particularly bold, I decided to liberate something.

When I finally got home from school that day I knew, as always, that I would have forty-five minutes until my Mum arrived home with my little sister, a time slot which over the coming weeks allowed me to read the magazine in its entirety. Erotic fiction gets a bad name, but within those pages existed a genuine warmth, and celebration of sex, not to mention lots of pictures of naked women. They were a blissful forty-five minutes, yet with paradise must come trouble. Where indeed to hide it?

I shared a room with my little sister, so leaving it there just wasn’t an option. After much deliberation and thought I eventually decided on the airing cupboard underneath some old pillowcases.

It was around lunchtime the next day though that I first got ‘the fear’. Daydreaming in the gorgeous boredom of an idle geography lesson, I began to imagine situations where my Dad, or worse yet my Mum, had found it. The likeliness of its discovery was sparse, yet the possibilities were endless, as were the ramifications. My parents wouldn’t have been overly concerned with my possession of such an article, but more so with the manner of its acquisition, which might lead back to poor old Raj.

Following the geography lesson, I had to endure an excruciating journey home, which I finished doubled over in the airing cupboard breathing an enormous sigh of relief.

Two months went by like this until one day I just couldn’t handle the ups and downs anymore. So, with a heavy heart I returned her to the shelf from whence she had come.

The winter afternoons now seemed colder than ever, yet with winter comes Christmas, with Christmas comes presents, and this particular Christmas heralded our first family computer. Most families already had a computer by then, but my Father had decided that he wanted to wait out the Millennium bug. Being the oldest child, I was given sole responsibility of figuring out how it worked, and thus I was given the keys to the city.

From that day on I was free to browse to my hearts content, safe in knowledge that I could just delete the evidence. And anything I downloaded was expertly hidden in a labyrinth of folders.

Raj, and the newsagents are still there, and so is my magazine. A few times I’ve even thought about buying it, yet the moment always escapes me. Besides, maybe that’s where it belongs, on the back of the shelf, and in the past.