Dave and Phyl were having sex in her cottage outside Chipping Ongar

Sorry, that was a spoiler - but it's a sentence I may never now forget, a classic of its kind, and now it's in a place where I can always find it again.

Over at Fisking Central they're taking quite the interest in this year's Bad Sex Awards - the prize bestowed by the Literary Review on the worst (ahem) purple passage... I'm sure you get the drift. Nominees included the gnomelike Irving Welsh; amusingly, the list of past winners seems to include no women. Do we write about it better? Or do we just know when to stop?

Anyway, the prize has gone to Iain Hollingshead, for his novel Twentysomething, but the guys at Fisking reckon Will Self was robbed. Take a look.

STOP PRESS

Further research (why do I not simply remember these things from one year to the next?) reveals that Wendy Perriam won the 2002 award for, among other bits, this:

"She closed her eyes, saw his dark-as-treacle-toffee eyes gazing down at her. Weirdly, he was clad in pin-stripes at the same time as being naked. Pin-stripes were erotic, the uniform of fathers, two-dimensional fathers."