All the fun of the affair

'The ideal time for an affair is while you're already having another one. The only drawback is when they all want to see the same film'

I suggested in Monday's paper that there is a very easy way of avoiding the kind of front-page headlines which engulfed Edwina Currie and John Major, and that is to sign a strict contract every time you have an affair, which binds both sides to silence.

I have obviously touched a nerve here, as I have received many letters from people who have had such an experience and are willing to pass on advice, from others who simply wish to comment on the pros and cons of having an affair, or simply from various women who have been embroiled with me in the past and who now bitterly regret it. I am bringing you a carefully selected cross-section of these letters.

From Professor Ian Clampit:

Sir, I would like to point out that this is not a new problem. Infidelity has always been with us. I recently came across a play entitled La Parisienne, written over a century ago by a now forgotten French playwright called Henri Becque. In the first act the woman of the house is being accused by the man of the house of having an affair. "There is someone else, isn't there?" he insists. "You've been seeing someone else, haven't you?" Just as she is hotly denying it, we hear a door opening. "Hush!" she says. "It's my husband coming!" and you suddenly realise that this is her lover accusing her of being unfaithful!

Yours etc

From Mr Thomas Rigby:

Sir, I would like to endorse the foregoing. The ideal time to have an affair is while you are already having another affair. There was a time when I was seeing three women at the same time, one of them my wife. They all thought I was having an affair with someone else, but always with a woman with whom I was not actually involved, so I could easily disprove their suspicions.

The only drawback was that they often all wanted to see the same film, and I would find myself sitting through it three times. The penalty of infidelity is getting heartily sick of seeing The Usual Suspects. I am only glad it wasn't Titanic.

Yours etc

From Mrs Hattie Marquand:

Sir, There was a time in my married life when I was convinced that my husband was having an affair. He was very secretive about where he was going, had many unexplained calls and letters, and several times could not even explain where he had been. One day I determined to follow him to see where he was off to, and trailed him to a park in central London where he had a rendezvous – not with a woman, but another man! They sat together for some time, then exchanged letters or presents or something, and parted.

That evening, in some distress, I taxed him with having a homosexual liaison. He burst out laughing and said he shouldn't really tell me this, but he was actually working for intelligence and whenever I thought he was seeing someone secretly he was actually off spying. (The man in the park was a Russian defector.) I was much relieved, even though it was the sort of plot that might turn up in a bad Jeffrey Archer story. And perhaps has.

Yours etc

From Mr Ted Kirtle:

Sir, Mrs Marquand doesn't know the half of it. I have occasionally had flings which I wanted to keep secret and I, too, tried the method of signing my loved one to an agreement not to publish any factual details of our affair.

Where I went wrong was in not guarding against fictional use of the relationship.

I have twice had affairs with lady writers, and subsequently seen our affair, thinly disguised, turn up in their novels. So thinly disguised that I have had to go to enormous lengths to keep my wife from reading them.

Especially as I seem to come out of these fictional portrayals so badly.

In one novel, written by an Irish lady novelist, there was even an unpleasant character who insisted on his girlfriends signing a contract of secrecy before any intimacy took place. The critics all said that it was a ludicrous invention. I said nothing. I merely sent her a small bill for "theft of idea".

I am still, I am sorry to say, waiting to be paid.

Yours etc