Is it hot in here or is it just me?

Intimate Encounters part two...... spoiler alert if this show gets put on at Edinburgh or something

With the blindfold securely in place and unable to see a flippin' thing, I was led by the hand through some curtains and handed over to another invisible woman who embraced me tenderly. Curiously I found my automatic response to being hugged by an invisible stranger was to reciprocate in kind. I would have thought a more analytical process would have taken place where I would think "this is a performance, I am the audience, I am just supposed to receive it, and in any case groping women I haven't even spoken to is a shortcut to a knee in the goolies". And so if somebody stroked my hair, I stroked their hair, and if they placed my hand on a naughty part of their chest, I just left it there. Come to think of it, that latter action wasn't my first instinct.

There seemed to be a number of women (and the occasional bloke, identifiable by a slight case of halitosis and a lack of lady parts) wandering in and out of my "zone", sometimes just brushing against me, sometimes touching me quite firmly, sometimes deliberately tickling me. There was slow, close dancing, there was silly jumping up and down, there was me sitting on a chair with someone sat on my knee while somebody else draped themselves over my back. It was continually surprising and extremely enjoyable. A strange mixture of emotions ran through me while all this was going on, a subliminal one of which was how nice it was that a bunch of people I didn't know were prepared to touch me. Day to day life tends not to incorporate much touching outside of sexual partner intimacy and a brief hug of your friends, which is not something I'd given much thought to. And yes, one can book a massage and a stranger will touch you but that's a professional relationship and not much more intimate than the one you have with your dentist. Unless you have a secret yen for your dentist or you have some kind of tooth fetish. I still have no desire to go to a cuddle party though. Google it and be afraid.

Occasionally there would be respite from all this when I was led into a tiny tented area, made to kneel and the blindfold whipped off. There was one other person in the tent - once it was a young lady stroking herself coquettishly and speaking in what I could only assume was Esperanto, a language I have since decided must be the language of lurve. Another time there was a girl who seemed to be having a bad trip and mumbled haltingly desperate incomprehensible pleas for me to do who knows what. Ultimately someone sneaked up behind me and replaced the blindfold and I was dragged back towards more touch feely people, where sometimes someone would suddenly blow in my face or whisper something endearing in my ear.

And then after about 45 minutes I was plonked in a chair, my blindfold removed for the last time, and there I was alone in a curtained-off space with my shoes in front of me in a basket. Feeling a tad drained and slightly elated, partly from the intensity of the experience and from having to endlessly second guess what my next reaction might be. Marvellous and totally unlike anything else on at Brighton Festival this year, or any other year. And yet nobody reviewed it.

N.B. Actually I now find that there are a couple of reviews out there but at least one of them didn't get posted until after the festival was over. Since speaking to a man who knows I have found that the point of these reviews is to feed the PR machine to get important people to like you, not to let Joe Soap know what might be a good show to attend. I am an innocent abroad.

Cheeky Tim