I wed an electron in the seventies. Talk about naïve! I wore pyjamas to protect the sheets, watched her striptease of hoola-hoops force fields, an aching dance I could never relieve with my brushed-cotton rhythms. There wasn’t much love and I knew she’d leave.

On the rebound I found a randy muon, lived in sin. Now I felt sexy and she fancied me, so we did it all over the house and frequently. Mam decided to hate the floozy. They formed an alliance, started to plot when we might and might not fornicate. I split.

Let’s not be literal about this, I thought. Met a quark who came with two sisters. On the settee my luck had changed – a ménage à three or four! But like is harder than fucking. One day my harem went out for a bite but never came back.

Now I’m on my tenth mother, am doing fine. I take kin where I find them. I have a son with a lesbian proton (by IVF). We’re deuteron together. He’s happy, and he knows he’s mine, for all his step nans. We shine, we shine.