Jeremy Clarke: When public vice improves private virtue

So I go to the all-night house party with my rolled-up yoga mat under my arm. Nice house, middle-class crowd, everybody drunk. Women’s screams coming from upstairs. Looking for the lavatory, I find one vacant at the top of the stairs. I’m in mid-stream when this bloke bursts in and slams the door again behind him. He’s a big bloke and it’s a small lavatory. To accommodate him, I shuffle around the bowl and come at it now from the side. ‘Don’t mind me, pal,’ he says, all business-like. He delicately opens a tiny plastic bag, licks his thumb and shoves it into the powder as if it’s sherbert and he’s ten years old. He licks his thumb lovingly and plunges it into the bag again. ‘Here you go,’ he says, and he offers me his white MDMA-coated thumb to suck. ‘The Yorkshire method, pal. E by gum.’

He stands his thumb up in front of my face. I hesitate. I’ve never sucked a man’s thumb before. It seems indecent and more to the point terribly unhygienic. Apart from being in his mouth just now, that thumb might have been anywhere since he last washed his hands. ‘No, thanks,’ I tell him. ‘You have that.’ But the huge, coated thumb in front of my face is obdurate, unwavering. ‘Come on, pal,’ he says, with genial condescension. ‘It’ll put hairs on your chest.’

I transfer my eyes from the bowl to the bulbous thumb in front of my face. If the police were to burst in now, technically I could get seven years for the privilege of leaning forward and sucking his class A off that. This is a casual observation merely, and not a cavil. I look him in the face.