Reminiscipackage

It was this chap's face that first caught my attention.


When I was a student, back in the days when English universities were much smaller but used public funds in a concetrated way to provide a high standard of education, it was compulsory for those of us studying archaeology to spend at least three weeks abroad on fieldwork. Which the university paid for.


While some of my colleagues inexplicably chose to go to, say, the peat bogs of Ireland or the vast, desert-like tracts of rocky tundra in Iceland, I chose to go to the sunny landscapes of Tunisia.


As a hugely impressionable and wildly oversexed teenager, I was mightily smitten by the Arab men I encountered there.


Men in their early twenties: not yet married, segregated from women, used to easy bodily intimacy with each other, and not averse to having a bit of pale English flesh. And yet hugely masculine.


I thought they were staggeringly beautiful.


To this day I retain a tropism for North African men.


And a return trip to Tunisia a couple of years back confirmed just how breathtaking and delightfully louche many of these men are.


So of course I was going to be smitten by this lovely-looking lovely.


He exhibits himself for our delight, sporting a faint goatee that only adds to his ersatz porno exoticism.


Sometimes I feel I am like a machine, rigidly programmed into an exploitative rut of my own devising.