The gap between thought and action is never as narrow as it is for masturbating. Suddenly it’s happening. Suddenly it’s over. Suddenly you’re back at your desk. But if politics has taught us anything, it’s that the machinery of government can stretch even the simplest task across countless hours and subcommittees. After my wife sent me for an nhs fertility test, I had to book a appointment with a gp, then the gp booked a second with me, the gp called asking me to collect a form, the gp referred me to a hospital and the hospital to an administrator, who called a month later to ask whether I’d rather ‘produce’ at home or ‘produce’ at the hospital.

Masturbated by an arm of the state rather than my own, the process had slowed to a kind of interminable NHS-edging. On the phone I exhaled, forced to compare the sadness of travelling three miles to masturbate into a cup with the stress of carrying that cup three miles within 30 minutes. The administrator repeatedly issued that warning: ‘The product must arrive within 30 minutes.’

Finding any department in a hospital takes ten, competing for an Uber, 5. The drive added another twelve. That left three minutes for error. And under that pressure, the mad dash from the cab would’ve felt too slapstick: I pictured myself running, holding the cup from my body like a grenade, maybe falling down, ‘Where’s the fertility clinic? Where is it?!’

I asked the administrator what times were available to ‘produce’ on site, resisting the temptation to add, ‘I usually prefer first thing in the morning or last thing at night.’ She released a deep nhs sigh and started scrolling, out of the winter and past most of the spring. Ever the coquette, the state refused to stop teasing. The only time we could make work for this ejaculation was 10am on a Monday – either I took a morning off work or waited another month.

‘10am?’ I thought afterwards, warming to the idea. ‘What a treat.’

In the end, that Monday followed a friend’s stag do. Fresh from three days of binge drinking in a dilapidated Airbnb somewhere in the West Midlands, I woke up, took three Nurofen, paced around my flat for 40 minutes and decided that my condition – given the number of babies that are conceived drunk – was probably conducive to fertility.

The silence among the seven men in the waiting room I’d only heard once before, at Ground Zero in New York. They were sitting as far apart as possible, all avoiding eye contact with each other and, especially, the receptionist. Some were flicking through the booklet the hospital posts you before the appointment, reading the questions asked frequently enough to feature in the faqs, which include: ‘Can my girlfriend/wife/partner assist me in the production room?’ (no), and ‘Can a member of staff assist me in the production room?’ (no).

‘Sex’, the booklet laments, ‘isn’t allowed on the premises,’ be it with a loved one or the receptionist. However, partners are admitted to the production room to assist in non-intercourse activity for ‘valid medical or religious reasons’, a caveat that has surely led to at least one man arriving in a recently purchased thawb or an unnecessary wheelchair. Whether non-partners are admitted for this non-intercourse isn’t indicated; the booklet’s stone age emphasis on ‘partner’ makes no allowances for swingers or the use of escorts.