This is the kitten Nancy, who has taken up residence in my delightfully colour-coordinated mop bucket here Somewhere in ClubMed. She’s a game girl Nancy, a living example of how and why curiosity killed the cat. She is the kind of feline you’d see taking refuge in Reservoir 3 of the Fukushima reactor, or perhaps on the upper foothills of Vesuvius shortly before Pompeii II. She’s an explorer with all the survival instincts of a Japanese Kamikaze pilot.

Meanwhile, to the right here is Nancy’s mum (left of picture) preparing to receive boarders in search of milk – viz: Nancy and one of her sisters….who appears to have her head up Mum’s ass, but is in fact just about to attack her mother’s southernmost teet.

  And next, to the left we see four siblings going at it hammer and nails as poor old Mum capitulates in the face of a mass calcium-seeking mouth attack. Watching this process taking place I was once more glad to be a bloke, and not a feline girlie forced to be some sort of mobile filling station. I once knew an advertising creative director who used to suggest that men don’t have tits because if they did, they would spend the entire day fondling themselves and never get anything worthwhile done. There was some logic but very little sanity in what he said.

The preponderance of black tails among Nancy’s siblings points the finger of blame firmly in the direction of a prowling jet-black Tom who takes a vague and on the whole feckless lack of interest in the goings on in the immediate vicinity of my rental property. So yes, here we are again back on the never-ending subject of sex. And if you thought Bunga-bunga was a recent Berlusconian invention, then clearly you have never heard of Japanese Shunga – a form of sexual celebration allegedly so hot it doesn’t need the second Shunga.

Shunga is an art form that flourished between 1600 and the late 1900s – the Edo period – when Japan cut itself off from the outside world. Uncontaminated by the inhibited sexual attitudes of Christianity or Islam, and smiled on by its own religion of Shinto, Japan embraced a culture of sexual delight and pleasure. For some 200 years this expressed itself in paintings of explicit sexual encounters. Dame Joan Bakewell in the Telegraph describes it as “no guilt, no shame, no hypocrisy”, but to be honest some of the positions involved in Shunga put one more in mind of an Origami gang-bang than anything else. When first introduced to this art form several decades ago, I was pretty underwhelmed….if only because the Japanese women seemed to me somewhat saggy and chubby, and the male members on display (to say the least of it) a triumph of hope over experience.

Either way, an exhibition is to run at the British Museum from October 3 2013 to January 5, 2014. I won’t be going.