I was also wondering why my bedroom smelt faintly of guinea pig, but that doesn't make me sound quite so clever.

Specifically, why virginity is always something that is said to have been lost. Lose is what we do with keys, minds and curling matches, not maidenheads. Some people exchange their virtue for things, which may or may not later turn out to have been a good deal. Some have it stolen from them. Most of us simply abandon it by the wayside with varying degrees of reluctance and glee, like a 1970's sofa after a visit to Ikea. Whatever we did with it, we can usually remember where we last had it.

Similarly, there are hundreds upon hundreds of delicious verbs in the English language but we only ever seem to fall in love.

Falling in love puts me in mind of a bracing, post-Sunday lunch stroll along Beachy Head in a waxed jacket and calalogue slacks. Suddenly your stout brougued foot takes a wrong turn and you find yourself bleeding unpleasantly on the foaming rocks below, hoping the air ambulance and accompanying ITV film crew arrive before you get washed out to sea. Possibly not always an entirely unrealistic analogy but an unforgivably mealy one and besides, elasticated waistbands are never condusive to romance. If it must be thought of as a descent at all, let it be the kind where a hole is dug in a forest floor and covered with branches and a dastadly man lurks behind a huge oak, twiddling his black moustache as the fair maiden plummets into his trap.

Better still, let us use words that decribe the process more accurately. I have never fallen in love, but I have blundered, gambolled, ricocheted and sauntered into it. I have a cousin who does nothing less than somersault into it every time and a friend who on one memorable occasion stampeded into it with every other member of her women's rugby team. To fall seems all at once too ordinary and not ordinary enough.