Deviant lifestyles in fragrant surroundings are always a bit of a shock. One afternoon I knock on the door of a Victorian semi in a desirable street in north London, average house price £700,000, all period features and private schools. A middle-aged sex maniac answers the door; she is the author of graphic, no-holes-barred (sorry) erotic memoirs and she looks frankly disappointing. Not a love bite or a stocking top in sight. Instead a long, flowing skirt, subtle make-up, curly blonde hair strictly tamed, and covered for our pictures with a dark wig. The only giveaway (but not really) is a low-cut top from which breasts – for which she receives the gratitude of many – threaten to spill. Does she have a parking voucher, please?

I wonder if “Dr Donny”, the tall, dark, handsome stranger who arrived on this very doorstep one morning, interrupted the flow of their shared fantasy to satisfy local parking regulations. Probably not. The wardens are hot in these parts, but not as hot as the sex. Their assignation was arranged via a chatroom and telephone call: she opened the door and ran upstairs, while the “doctor”, actually a fund manager with a stethoscope and an unusual bedside manner, followed on. He could have left her robbed and battered – though rape would have been a pretty impossible charge to uphold – but instead he left his calling card and asked to come again. This is the woman men have always believed exists, the saucy nympho who beckons from her door with a smile and a negligee, the one their wives insist is a figment of their fetid imaginations. This woman is a reward for their unfailing hopefulness. She is also their worst nightmare: a merciless judge of male members.

Portnoy has written two books, in the tradition of Anaïs Nin and Catherine Millet, though thankfully she has none of the latter’s literary pretensions. The first book, The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker, was published two years ago to a gratifyingly outraged response (the Daily Mail painted her as tragic, which, for a self-appointed iconoclast, is pretty much the Oscar). It sold 30,000 copies in three languages, very decent figures for her genre. As far as she can tell, her readers are fortysomething women whose partners read the books rather than buy them.

She is in successful company: titles such as Jane Juska’s A Round-Heeled Woman and Abby Lee’s Girl with a One Track Mind have turned erotic memoirs into breakthrough blockbusters. Portnoy’s follow-up, The Not So Invisible Woman, is published this month, not so much a sequel as more of the same. (Her editor at Virgin Books said not to worry; more of the same would be fine.) She also runs a blog, which she launched to market the books, with a podcast dispensing master classes in bedroom events.

She is rather like Delia waxing about the variations on a classic victoria sponge, full of helpful hints on technique and tips for foolproof results. Isn’t she embarrassed? She laughs, putting her head on one side, all cutesy. “Aw, no, I like it too much.” Her books are a rampant picaresque through naturist saunas, swingers’ clubs, fetish joints and online chat rooms where chat is the last thing on the agenda; pornographic and crude, the smells and emissions of copulation are their obsession. If you took away the dirty stuff, no narrative would be left; if you took away the internet, there would be no Portnoy persona at all. Cybersex and its global confluence of niche peccadilloes rescued her life – or ruined it, if you are a moralist – from the sexless invisibility of the middle-aged woman, described and sometimes welcomed by feminist writers such as Germaine Greer, but not by a gal who wants to make trousers strain at the seams.

We have spoken before, Suzanne Portnoy and I. In her straight life, using her real name, she is an entertainment PR with whom I once tried to set up a story. It didn’t work out, but she offered me tickets to a family show she thought my little son might enjoy: friendly, professional, to the point. This is clearly how she runs her sex life. As I walk into her kitchen, she points out the hot tub in her small back garden, first stop for the conquests she brings home (second stop: kitchen table); it is overlooked by an entire block of neighbours, which amuses the new heroine of clit-lit.

Portnoy, 46, is straight-talking, shameless. She laughs all the time, a big, brash, pearly toothed laugh, which is her weapon and her armour; she acts brazen, but actually she is trying to stop you getting to know her. When you have sacrificed your sexual privacy, you guard your domestic trivia, the only secret left, like a rottweiler.

Having read her books, you know more than you could ever want to know about a divorced mother who doesn’t wear knickers: you know what she keeps in her bedside cabinets – and it’s not Vicks Sinex nasal spray like me. Her ideal weekend, when her two sons stay with their father, is as a single woman on the swingers’ scene.

Portnoy was married to a handsome executive in the entertainment industry for a decade. It was a rocky marriage, latterly celibate, which set her on the road to sexual nirvana. “Suzy housewife” was overweight, frustrated, subsumed in home-making and motherhood. The sex, which had never been explosive, became a distant memory. “I suggested to my husband that if he wanted to kick-start our relationship he should buy some porn. He just said, ‘You’re sick.’ My kids were always wrapped around me. I couldn’t bear anyone else to touch me.”

One night when she was drunk and her husband away on business, she meandered online to a contact website, insisting that all she wanted was a male pen pal with whom to discuss her life. Instead she met a New York lawyer with whom she shared a sexual epiphany. She flew to see him for sex, at first lying to her seemingly unconcerned husband, once – and this is where I can’t help disapproving – even taking her young kids to stay in his flat while his own family were away. “We were catalysts for each other’s sort of sexual journey,” she recalls in her twangy hybrid transatlantic accent. “He wanted to explore sexual experiences. And I felt as if I was going back to my twenties and reinventing myself.

It was very exciting and scary. There was a lot of fantasy. I love fantasy.” But with Portnoy it doesn’t remain fantasy for long. The only thing he wanted that she couldn’t provide was to be told how much she hated him. Her fellow travellers, you see, are not just hedonistic pioneers: the damaged are present in numbers. The self-destructive are happy to be selling themselves cheap; the addicts are seeking oblivion. Curiously, however, none of this is the case with Portnoy.

The daughter of conventional and happily married parents in a close-knit Jewish family, she was a bookish girl, growing up in London and America. They gave her little to rebel against, if that’s what we were assuming; a liberalism she has bestowed on her own sons, aged 13 and 16. “My children are so straight that it’s funny. My youngest son said to me once, ‘You tell us we can do anything, we can talk to you about anything, but because you’ve done it all, we don’t want to.’” She warns her older son, but gently. “I say, if you are gonna have sex, please be safe. If you’re gonna take drugs, don’t take a lot of them.”

Is Portnoy safe herself? In seven years of wild sex with strangers she can only recall one incident that looked as if it might turn nasty. Paradoxically for a secret life, she sticks to public places; she is regularly tested for diseases she has never caught; she uses condoms. Even when blindfolded in a sex club, the only thing she demands is that male members be properly dressed.

She lost her virginity at 17, was sexually adventurous at university, was made miserable by unrequited crushes in her twenties. She has more than made up for that in middle age by casting a smaller net and turning an ocean of unavailable men into a pond of appreciative specialists. In the real world she might find it hard to hook a handsome banker; she’s too old, too curvaceous and, as she herself says, “hardly Cindy Crawford”, probably too loud and scary to boot. Being single at swingers’ parties, however, makes her hot property; being adventurous makes her a catch; truly enjoying sex makes it all easy for her.

But not as easy as the internet makes it. With a ready-made infrastructure of infidelity, women can advertise for NSA (no strings attached) encounters. No longer needing to brave bars and clubs to meet men, straight or swinging women access hook-up sites such as meet2cheat.co.uk or illicitencounters.co.uk, along with texts, webcams, hidden e-mail accounts. Portnoy’s favourite, Swinging Heaven, boasts over 800,000 members, mostly men; but look out, boys, she says, the women are coming. Memoirs like hers are the glossy brochures for a libidinous minibreak: the books are leading the curious to experiment, the sex is producing the books, and growing the market. Her editor at Virgin Books, Adam Nevill, talks of a “sexual revolution… not dissimilar to what happened in the Sixties in terms of changing attitudes to sexual lifestyles”.

The writing started while she was living with a boyfriend, Daniel. She sent his unpublished novel and her cheeky blog, detailing her life as a London PR, to a publisher, who asked her to turn it into a book. Tragically, Daniel died of liver cancer. I’ve never read a more perfunctory description of the death of a lover; but then she keeps the stuff that makes her cry to herself – she will open her legs to a roomful of men, but she won’t open her heart. Though she no longer loved him, she tried to score some Viagra so that she could make his last weeks more tolerable. His doctor was appalled, but you can’t help admiring her courage in making the request. By the time she got the prescription, he was too sick for sex.

His death in 2005 was the launch pad for her dive into sexual adventure, as if every day were her last. While he had been dying at home she had found solace by logging onto a swinging site. The day he passed away she went to Rio’s, a unisex naturist club in Kentish Town, where brushing a thigh in the sauna or a fumble in the Jacuzzi (whose waters you’d think twice about sampling) can soon spark a mini-orgy in a specially allocated room. (The place is mentioned so often, its owners should sponsor her website.)

“I thought, I really am going to have a good time now. I’m gonna go for it in a major, major way. And a friend of mine who had suffered the death of both parents in a short period of time told me she’d have shagged a tree on the day her mum died. I felt like that. It’s like sex is an answer to death, grief and everything. You just feel like, ‘Give me something that makes me feel alive.’ ”

In the middle of this maelstrom, she met 50-year-old Greg, her long-time swinging partner and sexual mentor, with whom she now shares a cosy if unusual Memory Lane. A year or so after Daniel’s death, with six boyfriends on the go, she started to write her adventures, unencumbered by modesty, euphemism or guilt.

Is there something wrong with this woman? In the past her friends have worried about her, begged her to get help for sex addiction. And a Freudian analyst could have a field day with her insatiable need to be “filled up”; what is it that makes her feel so empty? Her lifestyle has lost her friends: judgmental women, mainly, those scared she would steal their men, and, I imagine, those who just thought it was all too seedy. In general, women need their friends to affirm their own life choices. Portnoy’s are too outré for comfort, too strident to be challenged, begging too many questions she can’t or won’t address.

We are roughly the same vintage, mothers of boys, writers, I am married, monogamous (sexually comatose compared to Portnoy). We have much and nothing in common. The longer I spend with Madam Sin discussing the etiquette of sauna sex, as sweet children gaze from framed school photographs on the shelf behind the sofa, the more I become aware that my life would horrify her, just as hers terrifies me. Liberation?

I cannot imagine anything worse than texting around London for men willing to stage a gangbang. To be honest, even the idea of maintaining an ever-ready bikini line is too much. Actually, to be really honest, the late nights would make it a deal-breaker. Is she a bad woman as well as a very naughty girl? I don’t think so. There is nothing wilfully cruel, or negligent, in how she treats others, but grading men according to the size of their penises seems a pointless reversal of the old sexism we all marched and shouted about a lifetime ago.

If she is impressed with the equipment, its owner might be admitted into her stable of studs, her rotating “dating portfolios”. Sexy Suze travels like a surveyor with a tape measure. Numbers present more of a problem than size: she can’t tell you how many men there have been because she stopped counting at 100. And for all her claims about being “in control”, isn’t she turning herself into a commodity to be used? Her answer is: as long as she’s enjoying it, so what? The censorious voices of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin might say that her voraciousness is feeding an industry in which women are base material, the pole dancers and strippers, the hostesses and lap-grinders, who are economically if not physically abused. The UK cyberporn market, to which she subscribes, was the fastest-growing in the world in 2006, its profits soaring into billions, many of its addicted victims trailing broken relationships behind them.

Why doesn’t she have a boyfriend? After her divorce she dated with a view to finding a replacement, but she stopped on realising that she already had one – or, rather, several. She looks at men practically: can they outwit her boredom threshold, match her schedule? “People say that love can conquer all. That’s rubbish. When you’re 47 you’re sorted, you’ve got your life. I meet twentysomething girls who think they’re sexually liberated, but the bottom line is that they’re trapped in a Cinderella fantasy, desperate to meet Mr Right, and thinking that the baby is gonna make it all perfect. It’s a generation thing. I was just the same.”

She calls herself a polyamorist, and is still looking for the primary relationship around which her more casual affairs – all long-term and ongoing – would cluster. Her psychic advises that she stop dismissing men as boyfriends for their tiny flaws; she has just got rid of one because she couldn’t deal with his teeth. What did for the New York lawyer was his dingy apartment (she’s a design snob) and the fact that he served her pasta on paper plates.

What are the logistics of running a double life? Actually, despite the pseudonym, disguised photographs and the avoidance of television, her cover is so flimsy it has been blown (or given away) many times. Her pen name (also a reference to the sexually ground-breaking Philip Roth novel) is less of a disguise than it would be if she really cared about anonymity. Her PR clients are apparently unperturbed. “To be honest, it’s pretty common knowledge who I am,” she says. “A lot of my clients know. In the area I work in, people are taking drugs and doing all sorts of shit. I sleep with a few people – so what? I’m not a police woman or a teacher.” Yet she appeals to you to be careful in protecting her identity, and clearly frets about it, which must be exhausting. She describes her life as “compartmentalised”, but the danger of crossover is constant; actually, she is trapped between proving that she is not ashamed of her sex life, and wanting to protect her sons. “They’re at an age where their friends might, you know, tease them.” Tease them? She works in the media, which employs many of their schoolfriends’ parents, and if her indiscretions ever reached the playground, it would be a case of torturing them rather than teasing them.

At first she seems to be saying that she hides her exploits from them. But the family computer is her cybersex club. And haven’t they found copies of her books lying around? “Oh, sure,” she laughs (and the laugh is definitely strategic), “but they’re not interested in my writing. It’s a bit like reading your mum’s diary.” Yes, I agree, and I would have ploughed through my own mother’s secret garden in two minutes, amazed and appalled. She shrugs. “They say, ‘We don’t want to know. Just as long as we don’t come home and you’re in an embarrassing situation.’” While we are talking her older son returns; tall, polite, saying hello and dashing upstairs, aware that I am “the journalist”. Why has his mum shared her predilections with a prurient or disapproving world? Not just for the money (her advance for her first book was “a couple of thousand”, though for her second the figure shot up to £20,000). She is an attention-seeker for sure, but it’s mainly because she sees her behaviour as meaningful.

“I can be a figurehead for a new kind of female sexuality,” she says seriously. She tells her kids that people are comforted (of all reactions to her prose, that must be the most unlikely) by her work. “My readers are relieved to hear that being sexual in your forties doesn’t make you a freak.”

If her sons asked her to stop, would she? She hesitates. “I think that… that’s a difficult… I don’t know. Obviously I want to protect them, but the bottom line is that somebody has to do this, and I’m the one who’s been chosen. It’s really important to me. They know that.”

I wonder what private conversations her parents might have about their beloved daughter’s antics, and their concerns for their grandchildren. I don’t imagine Portnoy gives it a moment’s thought. There is a selfishness to her quest, maybe partly the righteous urge to liberate a generation, but essentially focused on sating a mighty libido and bolstering an ego that is not as robust as we might assume.

Portnoy is an evangelist. She recommends her lifestyle to all. If most couples’ sex lives wither for want of communication, her scene is all about instant honesty. “It’s like the first-date conversation is, ‘Okay, if you could do anything, what would you do?’” When she reads those surveys about women preferring chocolate or shoes to sex, she assumes they must be having bad sex. You can see that it works for her. I don’t suspect her of exaggerating her exploits, or of lying about how happy they make her. Here is one menopause-bound woman at least who doesn’t grimace every time she passes a mirror, who may have found the alternative to HRT and acupuncture: so much sex that her serotonin levels keep her zinging as the oestrogen plummets, so many compliments that she is enviably convinced of her gorgeousness. “I’m constantly validated, so that’s how I see myself.” Will she be too old one day? A friend in her mid-fifties has suggested stopping at 85, and Portnoy seems satisfied with that.

Recently the action has slowed. After a course on tantric sex, she was counselled by her instructor to stop chasing orgasms and re-engage with the intimacy of sex. “I’d gone so much into fantasy and role-playing and swinging that I couldn’t just be with somebody and enjoy that.”

She has a handful of regulars, a “breakfast thing”, once every six weeks. She wants to make her Portnoy persona a full-time job, with a late-night-radio agony-aunt slot, a cross between Dr Ruth and Linda Lovelace, part of her qualification for which is that she loves men. “I never think of them as bastards,” she says benignly, but then she never allows herself to be let down by them. A producer friend of hers is chasing the film rights to her books, though quite how you’d make them more than a porno flick is hard to see. Being a published author has made her a celebrity at her old haunts and garnered a fan base (and some hate mail too). She admits that she could have her pick of her fans, but actually doesn’t take the opportunity. Her female correspondents seek advice on initiation into more and better sex; 80% of her letters are from men wanting it with her. She may fear intrusion, but I think she loves the power over men, normally only accorded to the super-beautiful, the youthful, the alluringly and unavailably sexy. When a fan asked her to lunch recently, she agreed on condition that he bring a gift of her favourite lingerie in her size; reading between the lines, she felt his disappointment that, despite her careful grooming and twice-a-week personal trainer, she didn’t look more like a fantasy creature. Tough. She doesn’t dwell on the knocks.

Portnoy is bold, self-assertive, but maybe a little disingenuous about what she wants from men. It is not quite as simple as just sex, nor as complicated as true love. She wants to be treated, pampered, showered with the perks enjoyed by wives and mistresses; she wants top trips, dinners – all the tokens of romantic esteem. Of course she “dates” penniless super-studs, but those who can’t perform for their supper might be expected to buy hers. That doesn’t mean she’s grasping, but that running her own cabaret is tiring, and even the feistiest impresarios need to feel looked-after sometimes. One problem is that, when what you love best about a man is his penis, he’ll probably end up resenting you for the compliment. Especially if you’re keen on rival specimens too. I’ll never read her books again – not my thing – but I’ll always wonder if her lust will see her into a cheerfully ribald old age or leave her stranded.

For all her saucy fan mail, Portnoy wants to be a poster girl more than a mature pin-up, a walking advertisement for unleashed female sexuality. She smashes taboos like glasses at a Jewish wedding (though I can’t see one of those on the horizon) and has tapped into a publishing market churning out the evidence – a sort of frontline sexual reportage, complete with casualties – that no-strings sex is the way forward. For a single woman whose main emotional attachment is to her children, it might provide short-term answers, but how many are there with this one’s industrial appetites and nonchalance about disapproval?

What makes her tick would make many women – even bold, curious, frustrated ones – feel unanchored and confused, ultimately lonely. Recently she met a woman at a party who told Portnoy her book had changed her life: she had begun an affair. Since infidelity is the most commonly cited reason for divorce, maybe she shouldn’t be so quick to congratulate herself on liberating the drearily married.

And what of her own future? She can stave off the loneliness of the empty nest with sex, keep her contacts updated, her publishers supplied with salacious manuscripts, but it might someday become a chore. As the chill wind of mortality rushes up her geriatric miniskirt, wouldn’t she rather be at home with a nice mug of cocoa, a faithful husband, even a cosy pair of knickers?

The Not So Invisible Woman (Virgin Books, £7.99) by Suzanne Portnoy is out this week

Memoirs of sex-seeking women

Frontline sexual reportage is a bestselling genre: 300,000 copies of books like these are bought every year.

Melissa Panarello’s One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, based on her own diaries, is the tale of a teenager’s multifarious sex life. Its frankness scandalised Italy; it has sold 2m copies worldwide.

Chick-lit gets ruder in this book by a London-based sex writer who calls herself “part slut, part hopeless romantic”. She sets off on her quest for a soul mate — who must also be a sex god — with comical results.

Catherine Millet, a French art critic and editor, gained instant notoriety with this graphic memoir of gang-bangs and orgies wrapped up in philosophy. Despite its pretensions, it has sold almost 1m copies in Europe.

An opera-loving teacher of English, Juska placed this ad in the New York Review of Books: “Before I turn 67 next March, I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like”. What ensued became a bestselling memoir.

Women and sex: facts and figures

A number of surveys reveal how important sex is to the British woman, especially if she is over 40

Half of British women are not satisfied with their sex lives

59% of British wives say they would leave their marriage if they could afford to

One in nine British women regards sex as “like any other household chore”

British women are twice as likely to be unfaithful as their French counterparts

40% of women over the age of 40 admit to being unfaithful to their partner

In a survey of fortysomething women, 70% said their sex lives were better than ever before;

82% said sex was as important as it was in their twenties; 45% wanted more sex than ever before; 69% felt more adventurous in bed; 66% felt more confident about their bodies

Almost two out of three British women have logged onto a personals website

Nearly 50,000 women visited the Erotica lifestyle show in west London last year.

(TimesOnline)

Steam of consciousness is not the easiest thing to read, I admit, and I apologize for this in advance. But today I had allergies act up and my nose has been running like a faucet so sleep is sort of out of the question until the combination of my body and some OTC meds clear me up. Confession: I think non-stop. Stress makes me think deeper and harder, as well. Today I read a story on the BBC online about sensory deprivation, and one former hostage said when you're alone you have to depend on you having "enough in your head" to get by, or something. I guess it's like that. The mind is the ultimate get-away. And, unlike TV, movies, or video-games, as thought-provoking and interactive as those may be, the mind has a way of urging you to churn out its contents into creative forces. Like this blog entry, for example.Virtual Worlds as the Ultimate Creative OutletThat's ultimately why virtual worlds that you can create in are so cool, because that mind-space pours out into a shared setting in a way that can be almost literal. Sure, things like music and writing and speech and other creative outlets wind up communicating that mind-space, but virtual worlds are so inherently surreal that they are like sharing dreams.

Last night at 8:15 someone began banging on the front door to my house. My family wasn't home at the time, but we rent the downstairs, and our tenant was in. David was in his pajamas, however, and decided to ignore the door. The man persisted. Then, after a few minutes, he moved to the side door and began banging away there. Getting no response, he walked around the house, ascended the rear stairs and began banging on the upstairs door. When he once again returned to the downstairs and resumed banging on the front door, David finally got dressed and opened it.

There stood a young man in his 20s who was obviously very excited about something. David asked the man what he wanted. "I am the person you've been talking to online," the young man said. David told him that he was mistaken, that he did not speak with him and that he did not have a computer nor Internet access. The man didn't believe him at first. "Isn't this [name of my street address]?"

"Yes it is," David answered, "but I don't know you. "

The man finally left, but the whole episode gave David the creeps. Who was this man, what had he been conversing about and what had he expected when he came to the door? We may never know. Both David and I thought of the many Internet sex sting operations that have taken place at a local fast food restaurant less than 300 yards away. Tonight we turned the deadbolts early.
The episode also shows just how weird things can get with identities when the online world and the real world collide.

Here was this man, engaged in a relationship with someone who apparently created an online identity and projected it onto David. So strong was the young man's belief in this identity that he could not conceed at first that David might not be the person with whom he had been conversing online. Perhaps he was suspicous that David was, in fact, that person but just wouldn't admit it. He seemed to place more trust in the disembodied identity he thought he knew than he did the man who stood before him. The identity had gained his confidence and trust.

Was the online person the man sought even real? Or just a construct? In Second Life you have people posing as fantasy characters they'd like to be. In chat rooms you have sexual predators pretending to be teenage boys. Identity is used as a tool for manipulation.

In the online world the concept of identity is relative.

My friend, Jon Udell, has frequently blogged about the issue of online identities and how easy it is for someone to hijak someone else's name and pose as that person when, for example, posting messages online. How do you know the person is who he says he is?

When the Internet intruded on his life in the real world, David could prove who he was. In cyberspace, however, you don't always really know who you're talking to.

(ComputerWorldBlog)

The Albion Park section of Second Life is generally a quiet place, a haven of whispering fir trees and babbling brooks set aside for those who "need to be alone to think, or want to chat privately." But shortly after 5 pm Eastern time on November 16, an avatar appeared in the 3-D-graphical skies above this online sanctuary and proceeded to unleash a mass of undiluted digital jackassery. The avatar, whom witnesses would describe as an African-American male clad head to toe in gleaming red battle armor, detonated a device that instantly filled the air with 30-foot-wide tumbling blue cubes and gaping cartoon mouths. For several minutes the freakish objects rained down, immobilizing nearby players with code that forced them to either log off or watch their avatars endlessly text-shout Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Get to the choppaaaaaaa!" tagline from Predator.

The virtual world Second Life has had a lot of bad press recently in Australia that has focused on the narcissistic and unprincipled behaviour of some of its inhabitants. Nearly six million people have joined Linden Lab’s Second Life since it went public in 2003 and there are currently 1.75 million 'active' members who have logged on in the last two months.

As a 3D virtual world, everything that exists in this virtual world — objects, buildings, clothes, land — has been created by the residents. Amid all the bad press, it is sometimes overlooked that Second Life also offers a very positive experience to people, especially with regard to understanding disabilities and offering opportunities to those with disabilities.

As a student Niels Schuddeboom travelled to Australia and was a reporter in Sydney for the 2000 Paralympic Games. Based in the university city of Utrecht in the Netherlands, he is confined to a wheelchair and was forced to drop out of his media course due to an uncompromising academic regime that was unable to work around his physical disabilities.

Known as Niles Sopor in Second Life, Niels has found an opportunity to forget his disability and experience walking life through his avatar. 'Perhaps the most profound difference I have experienced is that people have treated me differently' he said. 'In real life, due to my wheelchair and lack of physical coordination, people often regard me as intellectually as well as physically disabled.'

In the Netherlands it is unusual for people with physical disabilities to have jobs and there is a culture of protecting them from many aspects of life. Second Life has offered Niels the opportunity to break the mould. He runs his own company as a consultant on communications and new media.

Some companies are now using Second Life to experiment with alternative marketing campaigns. As well as offering commercial opportunities, Second Life has also provided Niels with the tools to express himself in artistic ways denied him in real life. He has, for example, been able to hold a camera in Second Life and take photos and make short movies.

Australian David Wallace, a quadriplegic who works as an IT coordinator at the South Australian Disability Information and Resource Centre in Adelaide has also found an outlet for his artistic side in Second Life. He recently held an exhibition of his Second Life art at the building that Illinois-based Bradley University have established on Information Island. Unlike Niels, David wanted to buy a wheelchair when he first entered Second Life and couldn’t find one! He has tried to build one in Second Life but has only had limited success.

David has found people to be very inclusive in Second Life, commenting on his blog, 'You’ve got all sorts of weird looking people in there, but everyone I’ve met seems to get along and be accepting.' British Second Lifer and cerebral palsy sufferer Simon Stevens (aka Simon Walsh in SL) has also kept his wheelchair, carrying it when he dances in Wheelies, the nightclub he operates in Second Life.

Able-bodied FEZ Rutherford has created the blog 2ndisability to record his work on developing applications for use in Second Life that replicate for the user the sensory experience of a first life physical disability. For example, he has developed applications that replicate various symptoms of different forms of blindness and cerebral palsy.

Not all visitors to his blog or people who meet him in Second Life understand that Fez is trying to comprehend how it might feel to be disabled. He has described this need to find out firsthand how others experience the world.

A dazed and confused Ben Trovato struggles to get a life in a virtual world. Christmas is a time for miracles. Before the week is out, we will look back, shake our heads in wonder and say: “It’s a miracle we survived." Personally, I am not prepared to chance it. Taking crime, taxi drivers and the aberrant nature of my family into account, the odds of not surviving are disproportionately high. I don’t have enough money to flee the country. I do, however, have plenty of time. Time which I intend spending with my new friends in my new life. My Second Life.

The godlets at Linden Labs must have taken a lot longer than six days to create this world. It’s far more complicated than the one I’m living in at the moment. I am told that once I have explored this vast digital continent teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity, I might even find a perfect piece of land on which to build my dream house. This is wonderful news. In my first life, I can barely afford to pay the rent.

Then I discover something that sets alarm bells ringing. Millions of US dollars flow through Second Life each month. Although the virtual currency is called the Linden dollar, it can be converted to genuine American money at LindeX, the SL Linden Dollar exchange. Excuse me? I will have to spend real money? My money? On stuff that doesn’t actually exist? This feels wrong.

The SL website opens on a digital babe wearing a bikini top, short skirt and giant black and white wings. Cute. Damn cute.

A registration form asks me to choose a Second Life name. I’m Joumase Troglodite and I’ll probably spend most of my time spelling it to the girls that I meet. But what the hell. If I have anything in Second Life, I have time. It’s not like I’m going to get old and die. Oh, no. None of that mortality nonsense for me.

I have 12 avatars to choose from, none of whom looks remotely like me. I’m assured that I will be able to change my appearance at any time. This is good, because I choose to be some sort of half-rabbit, half-rat.

Another form has just popped up. It wants my real name. They also want to know what country I come from. Things are bound to go horribly wrong. I put Sierra Leone.

Then, instead of being plunged into a brightly coloured Utopian paradise, I am encouraged to Upgrade to Premium Now! For 6 a month, I can get land on which to build, display my creations, entertain or run my own business. In return, I will receive a one-time grant of L1250 (that’s Linden dollars) plus a weekly allowance of L300.

My sphincter tightens reflexively. I am sorely tempted to Skip This Step, but I hesitate. I have been in strange places with no money before and I know how ugly things can turn.

Without my weekly allowance, I’ll be just another random rodent slouching down the street with nothing to do and nowhere to go. It will be a very bleak Christmas.

A payment form flashes up. Well, that’s my cover blown. I fill in my credit card details and submit. Not Authorised. No reasons given. Maybe it’s because I have provided them with two different real names. I skip back a couple of steps. Punch in my real name. Switch Sierra Leone for South Africa. I still get rejected.

It’s no good. I close down and start all over again, feeling increasingly like a refugee trying to get a permit to live in South Africa.

I try once again to upgrade from basic to premium, this time choosing the 9.95/month option. Something seems to have worked. I’m told that my next bill is due on January 8 2008 and I am allowed to buy 512m² of land.

It takes 15 minutes to download Second Life. And there it is. Wow. I am not alone. There are 49610 people logged in right now. At 9pm on a Saturday night.

Up pops a Critical Message. There are Behavioural Guidelines. Contravention of the Big Six will result in suspension or expulsion from the Second Life community. They don’t tell you what the Big Six are, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

As if by magic, I appear on Orientation Island where I will learn to move, communicate and modify my behaviour. A bit like a cross between a hi-tech kindergarten and a reformatory. Half a dozen avatars drift about looking just as lost and confused as me. Our names hover above our heads, making anonymity impossible.

I am no longer a rodent . I am now a handsome young avatar in jeans and a black shirt. Rather nice, if you ask me.

Talking is done through a stereo headset and microphone or by typing in your comments. Conversations appear on the screen, making typing errors seem like some sort of speech defect.

I turn around to find the sublimely named Satine Odriscoll watching me. “Hey babe,” I type. “Wanna grab some egg nog?” She stares at me in silence. No response. What’s the matter with this girl?

“Have you lost your hands?” I type. Still nothing. “Are you a mute?” I add. Suddenly she runs off. In tears, probably.

One of the tutorials on Orientation Island involves going to the library and fetching a torch. I want a beer, not a torch. Anyway, I do as they ask and I am pleased to see that it is at least a torch of the flaming variety.

Uh-oh. Someone called Samehabo Kanto has snuck up behind me and is clearly ogling my bum. What does she want? Why doesn’t she say something? What if it’s not even a girl? In my confusion, I somehow manage to attach three or four flaming torches to different parts of my anatomy. Everyone avoids me after that.

Bored with the tutorials, I inadvertently take off my pants. Luckily I have on a pair of white undies. This will almost certainly make my intentions a little clearer. I look around for someone to chat to, but I find myself all alone. Oh my God! Those aren’t undies! That’s my bum! I’m naked!

Then I have some sort of fit. My head shakes violently back and forth. Am I sick? How will I ever find a doctor? Fortunately, the shaking stops after a while and I wander off. I walk and walk and walk and see nobody at all. Great. Lost my way. Lost my pants. But look — I can fly! I soar over the sea and back across the island looking for parties to gate-crash.

When I finally land, Disco Randt comes up to me and asks me why my pants are off. I shrug and type, “You should know — you took them off.” Disco replies, “Yeah right” and hurries away.

Help Island is proving to be no help at all. Somehow I manage to teleport myself somewhere. A group of people are standing about chatting. Great. Maybe they know the way out. But from what I can pick up, they know very little about anything at all. They have mouths like sewers and say LOL in every sentence. They ignore me completely.

Disconsolately shambling along a path leading to nowhere, I come across an enormous billboard. It features a resident with some sort of No Entry sign over his crotch: “Please Don’t Walk Around Naked.”

Dumping reality in a crumpled heap on the bathroom floor, I fire up the Acer with fresh enthusiasm. Today, I’ll buy a house. Today, I’ll find a Christmas party. Today, I’ll … Hang on. Where’s my money? I’ve paid 9.95 and there’s still nothing in my account.

Cuwynne Deerhunter walks up to me. She is well-dressed and neatly groomed. I’m glad that I have my pants on. I type: “I am hungry. Please can I have some money to buy a loaf of bread? And maybe a house.” She calls me a loser and stalks off.

With nothing better to do, I drop by the offices of Uthango, the first South African not-for-profit company to open virtual offices in SL, to see if someone there could lend me money. Apart from me, the place is empty. Then again, it is a Sunday.

With nothing else to do I decide to go to the pub on the corner where the girls are friendly and the beers are cold. Spending Christmas in the real world might not be so bad, after all.

(TheTimes)