I was walking down my road one day – this was in the days before my arrest, therefore before my ill-repute – and a couple of little girls were sitting on their doorstep. One of them called out, “Hey, Mister, my friend wants to marry you!”

My wife, who was with me at the time, chuckled – as did I – and commented to me they were being daft. Well, of course they were – they were both only about 9 or 10 – and their giggles confirmed their playfulness.

Still, I thought, how much seriousness was actually in their ‘game’ and inside their little heads? Obviously they’d been contemplating the higher issues of man-and-woman, marriage and all that, as little girls do.

Still more, they’d have a kind of flippant and fledgling interest in men at that age, and what they think of men and the way we look. I would not claim for a second they’d be masturbating about me that night, just that they might have taken some stock of how I looked to them.

I was a fairly handsome fellow, if I may say so, a keen runner who kept himself in trim shape for a 35-year-old. It was not impossible, therefore, that one or both of them had their version of a juvenile attraction to me, hence the comment. I liked to think so, anyway.

I noted there was no denial from either of them; just the giggles. I glanced at them, allowing myself just enough time to see how they looked, but not holding it so long as to seem unnatural in any way. I gave them a happy but guarded smile; my wife was with me, after all.

Now, how you respond to a situation outwardly is never the same as what you think inwardly, is it? Not for most things, I suggest, and definitely not for this thing. Not for me, anyway. So, my thoughts went a-running.

The first thing to ascertain was which one of them had said the words and which one of them was it that wanted to marry me? Actually, it might have been the one that spoke who wanted to marry me, but she was just too embarrassed to say so she cheekily put it onto her friend.

Hell, come to think of it, maybe both of them in fact wanted to marry me, but it was only the one of them who had the mischief to verbalize it. And in the presence of my actual wife, to boot. Outrageous. Well, I could not make out which of them was the guilty little minx.

This left the question of which one of them would I actually have preferred to marry, given some diabolical alternate universe where such a decision was forced onto me? Imagine that: you have to marry a child, and it’s legal and expected of you in that culture.

Well, anyway, I noted that one of them was a mousy brown-head, fine sleek hair held down by one of those Alice-band things. The other was a distinct redhead, complete with the smattering of freckles and very white skin. The mousy one was prettier, but I might have actually gone for the redhead.