Mum’s sex advice to my friends embarrassed me, until I realised something [Video]

Crowded around the kitchen table, my school friends were writhing in horror as my friend Amelia recounted in delicious detail her suspicions that she’d interrupted a classmate touching herself in the loos.

‘Disgusting!’ shrieked one. ‘She’s a pervert nympho!’ offered another. Suddenly my mother turned from her elegant perch at the kitchen sink with a disapproving look on her face.

‘Masturbation in private is perfectly natural and pleasurable,’ she said. ‘Don’t YOU masturbate Amelia?’

‘What’s it like having a sex therapist for a mum?’ is a question I was asked so many times as a teenager.

For some years, I simply stopped telling people what my mother did (she hates the term ‘sex therapist’ by the way, and would always insist that I explain that she ‘specialises in helping people with their sexual and relationship problems’). 

And for much of that time, I would probably have told you that I found her career just as humiliating as the troubled son of Gillian …