One socially competent boy seeks girl to help him shag the elephant in the room into submission. Anyone fairly appealing and over may apply. And of course what better smorgasbord of all things fairly appealing and over then the start-of-term college bop? I’m successfully dodging any flying references to last week’s failure, as I attempt the deadly seduction technique of the deliberate cheek-kiss. However, after conquering the cheek of another fresher, our drinks knock against each other and we get a golden shower of red bull. “God I’m so sorry, I’m such an idiot”. “Oh it’s fine – we’re only going out to waste time until Magdalen Bridge, can you lend me a top? And you’ll need to change too, you’re soaked!” Readers, this was unexpected.

One socially competent boy seeks girl to help him shag the elephant in the room into submission. Anyone fairly appealing may apply. And of course where is a better smorgasbord of all things fairly appealing than the start-of-term college bop?

I’m successfully dodging any flying references to last week’s failure, as I attempt the deadly seduction technique of the deliberate cheek-kiss. However, after conquering the cheek of another fresher, our drinks knock against each other and we get a golden shower of red bull. “God I’m so sorry, I’m such an idiot”. “Oh it’s fine – we’re only going out to waste time until Magdalen Bridge, can you lend me a top? And you’ll need to change too, you’re soaked!” Readers, this was unexpected.

So we run back to my room near the college bar and I rifle through the drawers, pulling out a couple of shirts. I start to change when she pulls her top off in front of me and, with a casual smile, reaches out for the shirt in my hand. We’re both stood there, topless, and she laughs before she pulls the shirt on. She kisses me on the cheek (clearly she shares in the knowledge of my favourite ploy), before pulling me towards Wahoo. The infallibility of the cheek technique prevails.

We’re there for a few minutes before her friend arrives, and we go over to talk. “What are you wearing? It’s fucking huge.” “Oh, my friend gave it me… such a lifesaver”. And with that she goes, taking his hand and throwing me a “see you later”. Error on my part. Leaving soon after, I sack all May Day ambition off and start walking home. There’s just enough time left in the night to hopelessly confess the challenge to my friend next door.

There seems to be this stigma that, if you’re a boy, and not socially useless, you should invariably have had sex by the time you hit university. The more outgoing a personality you possess, the weirder you seem to become by revealing such a secret. I don’t tell people I’m a virgin. I’m a confident person, but I’m not that confident. I’ve had girlfriends in the past, before Oxford, but while we “did stuff”, it just wasn’t time for the main event.

When I got here in Michaelmas I’d been single for a while and was on the lookout for something serious, so I didn’t ever try to push things too far too soon with those girls I got close to. I suppose that’s why this coital crusade is even happening. By the time it got to Hilary, law mods had taken off and I calmed down on the whole relationship hunt to focus on work; it was starting to feel like ‘I want never gets’. No-one likes a keeno. And so to another week of Trinity, and to being casual, and unsuccessful.

I can feel her fingers running through my hair as we exchange hot, blurry kisses; I pull the curves of her body into mine. Long private minutes pass by; it’s not the best kiss ever, but for a friend of a friend things between us have been immediately easy. She’s really attractive, and there’s been a spark in the conversation. We’re stumbly with drink, clumsy tongues in each other’s mouths, but there’s nothing clumsy about the feel of her hips beneath the thin dress fabric. I slip kisses from her lips onto her neck, and she lets out a sigh which recovers into laughter, as she pulls away. The dull thud of the bass, the buzz of talk, and the amused faces of my friends watching from the bar come rushing back messily. I’m aware of a tug on my hand as she leads me away from the dancefloor towards the cloakroom. Cue even more amused faces from my friends as I leave, doing my best impression of a straight walk.

I can feel her fingers running through my hair as we exchange hot, blurry kisses; I pull the curves of her body into mine. Long private minutes pass by; it’s not the best kiss ever, but for a friend of a friend things between us have been immediately easy. She’s really attractive, and there’s been a spark in the conversation. We’re stumbly with drink, clumsy tongues in each other’s mouths, but there’s nothing clumsy about the feel of her hips beneath the thin dress fabric.

I slip kisses from her lips onto her neck, and she lets out a sigh which recovers into laughter, as she pulls away. The dull thud of the bass, the buzz of talk, and the amused faces of my friends watching from the bar come rushing back messily. I’m aware of a tug on my hand as she leads me away from the dancefloor towards the cloakroom. Cue even more amused faces from my friends as I leave, doing my best impression of a straight walk.

In the queue for coats I’m starting to feel the effects but I manage to drive my disorientation aside when she reaches her arm out behind and slowly starts to touch me through my jeans. Drunkenly playful, she opens her mouth slightly and arches her neck, and as her tongue touches against her teeth she presses her back against me and subtly pushes her hand down inside my jeans.

At this point, I start spinning, but can’t tell if it’s the drink or the girl. We reach the counter and I fall against it as she asks for her coat. They’re discussing some issue, but all else becomes irrelevant as I realise it’s the drink. Definitely the drink. Crisis: the drink is now an immediately pressing issue. In a moment of panic, I snatch her bag from the counter as she argues and run into a corner.

I can’t tell what’s more horrific, my emergency ability to projectile-aim, or the fact that no-one seems to have noticed. Closing the bag, I thrust it into the hands of a club worker coming past and tell them that the girl at the counter just dropped it.

I’m a horrible human being.

This is strike one, and it’s not a good start. It’s Trinity term; I’m a first-year lawyer; I’m also a virgin. I’m not embarrassed about it, and I don’t feel I have anything to prove, but I’m nineteen and never been… well, fucked. Is that too much to ask? So that’s what this diary is all about. If you’re in my situation then maybe you’ll go along for the (semi-proverbial) ride with me, and if not, it’ll be a great spectator sport.  

There you have it: eight weeks to lose the v-card. Eight strikes and I’m out. Let the games begin. No handbags necessary.

The vested interests in the tabloid media are invoking fallacious arguments in promoting free speech ahead of privacy.  The most common is some analogy of the ‘victimisation’ of consenting women by rich, famous men who are full in the knowledge that their actions can be veiled by an injunction. But the reason why it is predominantly the rich and famous who seek injunctions is not because they are the sole perpetrators of wrongdoings; it is because the costs of litigation exclude the majority, and it is only the famous that have their, otherwise, banal engagements embellished by the media. This argument therefore doesn’t address the morality of seeking injunctions.

The judiciary are set the task of balancing the conflicting human rights of free speech and a right to privacy. The central message from Lord Neuberger’s report on Friday was that free speech supersedes privacy either when an illicit activity has taken place, or if the matter is in the public interest. The Supreme Court make these judgments on a case-by-case basis. If an individual’s actions are legitimate and have no externalities then the public have no right to have exposure to them, unless they are collectively willing to engage in reciprocity, or in other words, they are willing to engage in a society with no privacy whatsoever.

Max Mosley is right. Whilst his actions with those women were far from orthodox, they were consented, perfectly legal and nobody’s business. But because his achievements have caught the public spotlight, it is inanely assumed that every trifle in his life is in the public interest. And though the classic retort claims that public figures should be scrutinised because of their elevated position – as if they were now sterile and inhuman, not every figure in public life wished its demands upon them. The late Princess Diana’s treatment by the media and her interview with Panorama in 1995 give weight to this notion. We should therefore assume that all famous people may not appreciate perpetual intrusion into their lives.

The central reason for the exposure of the idiosyncrasies of familiar people by the media is to provide entertainment. It is entertaining for some to find out that John Terry had transgressions with the girlfriend of a former team-mate, but the very same incident involving three members of the general public, unknown to the fourth person, would evoke indifference, not interest, in the fourth person. The same can be said about any personal issue or activity that someone may have or have done, which they’d prefer not to be shared with the world. So the moral debate should centre here: whether someone privy to an affair, vice or insecurity should have the responsibility to tattle. If society has said no, then it shouldn’t exhibit double standards by making spurious exceptions with criteria that clearly lie outside the accepted conditions of legality and public interest.

Of course, the consensus would be different, should the party privy to the information have loyalties to other parties and feels obliged to divulge. But this is acceptable because the social setting is more intimate, and the interested parties have a broader understanding of the demeanour and intentions of others, placing the incident in a context for which to make a better judgment. Tabloids feel obliged to their readers, and represent a macrocosm of the first case: documenting every move of an easy, recognisable prey and creating a distorted, caricatured and, therefore, untruthful context with the sole aim to profit through entertainment.

Lord Stoneham’s justification of using parliamentary privilege, allowing MPs or Lords to override court injunctions on free speech, to reveal Sir Fred Goodwin’s affair with an RBS colleague at the height of the banking collapse is contentious. To say that the affair blighted his judgment is completely irrelevant, because it’s an unverifiable claim and there are no meaningful lessons to be learned from it – except, maybe, the tautology that people in positions of power and responsibility are also subjected to the whims of human nature. One is not condoning Goodwin’s actions but merely removing them from the realm of perceived abnormality.

We should therefore welcome Lord Judge’s wider condemnation of the dissemination of defamations on the largely unregulated social networking platforms. In addition to declaiming that modern technology is ‘out of control’ in terms of restoring the balance between conflicting rights, he said: ‘ I am not giving up the possibility of people who, in effect, peddle lies about others using modern technology may one day be brought under control’. This is a slightly different issue, but both comments lie at the heart of the argument about using platforms to degrade people who have done nothing illegal and in the public interest. He was speaking in the context of influential Twitter users who promulgate information which for, whatever reason, should not be expressed with the intention either to mislead or to breach another person’s privacy. Lord Neuberger’s choice of words may have been improvable, but they encapsulate the need to rebalance the tradeoff between free speech and privacy, for however liberating the internet has been, liberation restricts privacy, and legislation needs to redress this. But in terms of the Supreme Court’s record on issuing injunctions and super-injunctions, it is getting the balance right.

Given that Bon Iver have been laying low for a little too long now, their latest offering comes as a welcome if not anticipated surprise. A 15 second snippet of ‘Calgary’ – the new track available for free download – leaked online a few months ago and generated more hype than all the Harry Potter movies put together. Sadly though, those few moments of warm synth and creeping vocals are more effective than the full length song. I’m not sure whether my two year long obsession with For Emma For Ever Ago has rendered me incapable of appreciating anything different from Bon, but there is a sense that they’re deviating away from their idiosyncratic sound and quite explicitly dipping a toe or three into the mainstream pool.

Although being a hater is so cliche, and hating mainstream is even more cliche, to me Bon Iver belong in the acoustic and heart wrenching sections of our stores, and seeing them lean towards a generic sound is disappointing to say the least. Although this track is as ethereal as anything For Emma had to offer it fails to get those hairs on the back of your neck standing up, causing a bit of casual head swaying instead. Following the seemingly inescapable trend of synthesisers and warbling electro sounds, Justin Vernon has buoyed up his up his distinctive vocals with some subtle Kanyeish auto-tune which thank God sounds nothing like Weezy on 808 & Heartbreak but does detract somewhat from the credibility of the song. Maybe that collaboration with Mr West was not such a good idea after all.

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Bon Iver’s straying away from the untrodden track into a more common realm, perhaps because of its ‘easy listening’ quality leaves you hungry for more. Lucky for us though, the self-titled second album drops on June 20th and is available to pre-order on iTunes now. As there is no risk of the record company running out of albums to sell, I don’t really get the concept of pre-ordering but if you’re eager to be the coolest kid on the block, you better get on it. This release also welcomes the arrival of their UK tour where they’ll play London’s Hammersmith Apollo on October 24th and you know I’ve got my ticket. Let’s just hope that the sheer brilliance of For Emma, Forever Ago seeps into Bon Iver even if it is heavily diluted.

In anticipation of the full 11-track album, I leave you with songs that will either remind you of Bon Iver in the good old days, or give you a snippet of what his underrated collaborations have to offer – there are a few random gems in there too. Enjoy.

Iver & Guests