Play it safe and use a dictionary. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES Today would not be a good day for me to die in suspicious circumstances. Admittedly most days aren’t good days to die in suspicious circs, but today is especially unfortunate because, when PC Flatfoot impounds my computer and checks through recent activity in a bid to throw light on my suspicious death, he will discover that the last computer search I conducted before expiring consisted of one word, troilism. Now, I have a perfectly innocent excuse for having looked up troilism, but if I’ve died in suspicious circs I’m not going to be able to deliver that excuse and you know how the rumour mill works. Soon it’ll be all over the papers and that will be that for any hope of a generous eulogy at the Lyttelton crematorium. All I’ll get as I whizz up the chimney into insubstantiality will be giggles and whispered smut. I’ll be past caring, of course, but it’s still galling to ponder after a life of such virtuous seclusion and restraint. But ah well. My excuse, which I’m committing to paper now just in case I do die later today in suspicious circs, is that I came across the word troilism in a collection of scurrilous magazine columns from the 1990s written by Michael Bywater. It was clear from the context that troilism was something fruity so I typed it in and up she popped, as they say. Obviously I should have maintained a lifelong habit and used a physical dictionary, but I didn’t and that’s that and now there’s the unerasable electronic record. Troilism is described as a paraphilia, and if you look up paraphilia, as I have just done in the interests of getting things bang right — oh the policeman is going to have a field day — you will see that it means ‘‘the experience of intense, recurring sexual urges, fantasies, or behaviours focused on atypical objects, activities, or situations.’’ In other words, perving. But as it happens I was already familiar with the word paraphilia because some 30 years ago I answered an advertisement for a ghost writer and found myself ghost writing a novel of sorts for a metallurgist based in Australia. The main character in his novel was a PhD student in — have you guessed it? — metallurgy, and the main subject of the novel was his psyche, which was a seething mass of paraphilias. His sexual interests were as strange and various as the fishes of the sea. But he was a shy soul, too shy to make ordinary friends, let alone the sort of friends needed to indulge his paraphiliac urges, so he sought ways to gratify himself alone. He liked, for example, — and readers of a sensitive disposition may wish to skip this paragraph and the next few — to be spanked. Having no-one to administer a spanking but himself he had to improvise and after experimentation he found that the most effective tool for delivering a more or less satisfactory auto-spank was a plastic chopping board. He also built himself a girlfriend. She consisted of an argon cylinder, with the tap and pressure gauge at the top forming a somewhat unsatisfactory head. But he dressed her in a range of licitly and illicitly acquired uniforms and many an evening he found solace in her metallic loveliness. And there was an awful lot more that is unsuitable for a family newspaper. Once, in corresponding with the author — welcome back, by the way, to the sensitive — I happened to mention that the material was obviously autobiographical. He expressed astonishment that I had guessed. Anyway, a few years ago I learned that the metallurgist had died in an unsuspicious house fire so I can’t see any harm in mentioning his story here. And my point in doing so is that of all the many and varied sexual deviances listed under the general heading of paraphilia, just about the only one that didn’t spin his strange little wheels was troilism. My advice is to use a dictionary. Or to look twice before crossing the road. • Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
