The problem with attending a course about writing sex scenes is that everything becomes a double entendre. In this, the course, run by the Raindance Film Festival, doesn’t help itself. An A4 piece of paper, masking-taped to the door outside: ‘FOR RAINDANCE HOW TO WRITE SEX SCENES,’ it says, ‘HEAD DOWNSTAIRS’. And so, down a narrow, deep-red passageway, I head.

There’s no shortage of classes teaching wannabe writers how to write books and scripts: ones that teach you about plot, character development and how you’re destined for a life of disappointment and ordering wine from the top of the menu. But a course specifically about sex? A course about the in-and-outs of the in-and-outs? I had to attend. The room is bedroom-small; there are around 30 of us. In front of me, a man scrawls, ‘How to write sex scenes’ on a Kindle-like device the size of an A4 pad in handwriting so large he needs to turn the digital page to record any further information.

The first thing we are told, by the teacher Natali Simmonds, is that it’s perfectly okay – encouraged even – to be aroused. Not now, you understand, but when writing. If it’s turning us on, Simmonds says, it’ll likely turn the reader on too. Don’t think: feel.

‘When you’re writing an emotional scene, do you cry?’ she says, by way of explanation.

Simmonds is in her mid-40s, half Spanish and a prolific author of both twisty thrillers and romantasy books where sexy werewolves get it on with witches. It was the latter, she tells me later, that lead her to first teach sex scenes over YouTube in lockdown; it has since become a side-hustle.

Her aim is to both demystify and destigmatise. She throws an opening question: who’s been scared of writing about sex until now? A slim, broad-­shouldered young man in the front ­row answers.

‘Sometimes I’m worried people will think what I’m writing is what I like,’ he says in an Essex twang. ‘And get accused of it: oh, you like that, do ya? Like, no, I don’t like that particular thing.’

We all silently wonder what that particular is and why he likes it so much. He’s writing, he later tells the class, a ‘very cartoonish’ comedy called The Virgin Essex Girl. Like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, he explains, but Essex.