How to ... be celebate

Millions of people are celibate without any sort of vow. In fact, many celibate people have taken heartfelt vows to have as much sex as possible. It just shows that vows generally stop at the waist.

People have differing levels of sexual drive. After one night without sex, some feel as if they've entered a monastery. Others don't notice they've missed sex for over a year.

With celibacy, the first three nights are the most difficult, but once you're up and running it gets easier and easier, until you get to the point where sex seems alien and grotesque compared with the real physical pleasure of potting a geranium.

Getting started again after a bout of celibacy can be tricky. Sex is not like riding a bicycle (except for the similar pressure on the saddle region). You quickly forget how to ride a person, and there's a lot of clumsy wobbling before you get back in the groove.

If you make love to the same person you made love to three years ago and they've developed some interesting new moves, it's a good indication they haven't shared your drought period.

Interestingly, people who take an unconscious vow of celibacy tend also to take another vow of silence. They stop talking about sex in the same way that they stopped talking about the Falklands war: it's a long way away, it's all over, and it wasn't very exciting in the first place.

Taking a vow of celibacy is generally counterproductive unless you have the sex drive of a galosh. Vowing not to do something focuses your mind on it as clearly as vowing to do it. No one thinks about food more passionately than dieters.

Celibacy would be easier if it didn't sound so clerical. Instead, say you're leading a "sex-free lifestyle".

There is a growing modern movement to "save yourself for marriage". This goes hand in hand with a similar movement among married couples who don't have sex either and are "saving themselves for their next marriage".

Monotheistic religions tend not to like sex and reserve feelings of ecstasy for prayer, conversion and revelation. The fact that the whole of creation is a seething orgy of reproduction can fortunately be brushed aside with a refreshing bout of self-mortification or martyrdom.

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