I love all the seasons: summer for its fun beach days and the warm sun rays recharging one’s soul; winter for its beautiful scenery, when the world is covered with fresh snow and for all the winter sports; spring for the flowers, bees, and the scent of nature’s awakening. But none of them sings so much in tune with the melancholic little girl, who lives in the forgotten depths of my soul, like autumn with the changing colours of the leaves and the calm of cosy nights in front of the fireplace on crisp evenings.

In the daytime, we are still basking in the warm sun rays but the mornings and evenings have a bitter nip already. It’s not chilly enough to turn the heating on just yet, but cold enough to get the blankets out, along with my favourite autumn spices. Everyone likes a nice creamy pumpkin spice latte but for me, it brings back some very special memories.

A few years after the turn of the millennium, I was living in the Big Apple and I briefly dated a guy called Robert. He was much older than me, in his late forties, possibly early fifties – I never asked - and I was in my early twenties. After working in the city all week, on Friday evening or Saturday morning, I drove to his place and stayed for the weekend. He lived in a small but beautiful ranch-style house on Long Island; offering a paradise of calm and serenity, a perfect antidote to my hectic city weekdays.

When I arrived, sometimes very late on Friday night, I often just fell asleep in his arms, waking up the next day to the scent of freshly brewed pumpkin spice coffee, cinnamon muffins baking in the oven and his arms around me, or the playful ticklish sensation of him blowing gentle kisses all over my body.

We always slept naked under a thick double duvet and it was too cold in the morning, so he made sure I could stay under the warm cover as he delved under the sheets and made sure I’d woken up fully, numerous times, if you know what I mean. He was such a selfless, gentle lover. My pleasure always came first and he knew what most don’t: one is never enough.

A huge smile is spreading on my lips now as I’m sipping my salted caramel latte (because pumpkin spice is so 2003) thinking of him, his virtuoso tongue, and his uh-m lovely chunky fingers.

Sometimes, I wonder why on earth are we left with the particular memories of our exes - or people in general – that we do. If you’d ask me what size he was in other departments, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. But other, seemingly insignificant details have stayed with me forever: the sound of his bare feet walking on the hardwood floor, the crackling of the fireplace, and the beautiful sunny but breezy afternoons we spent sitting on the dock of the bay kissing and indulging in a slightly scandalous foreplay, bringing outrage to the faces of his elderly neighbours. And of course, the scent of those autumn spiced, heavenly multiple-orgasmic mornings.

Gentlemen, I can, with great reassurance confirm that size does not matter, if you can offer another, long-lasting experience.

Reminiscing about those heated incidents on the dock, it occurs to my now more experienced, more kink-knowledgeable mind that he must have had an exhibitionist streak. Because not only was he a fan of – what’s nowadays fashionably referred to as an acronym, PDA - public display of affection, but every time we walked back to the house, still involved in frisky snogging, he ‘forgot’ to close the curtains on his big bay windows. His house was on a quiet, abandoned stretch of beach but still had the occasional dog walker passing by, which didn’t seem to bother him at all.

He took off all my clothes in agonising slow motion, one by one, right there in front of the window, kissing every bit of freshly revealed naked skin. I was lost in the sound of the crackling fireplace and the dreamy softness of his touch. By the time we were down to my underwear, it was soaking wet and I was purring with lust.

He sat me down in a huge old fashioned, chequered armchair, facing the window and his lips continued their journey into the depths of my body. He made me cum there in front of that window for the whole world to see. I guess I wasn’t as self-conscious back then, as I am now.

Then he carried me over to the adjacent couch and he made love to me in his favourite missionary position. I don’t think we ever did anything else but missionary. Sometimes we went for a nice evening stroll on the beach then continued what we did best in his bedroom until we were too tired to go on.

In the mornings, when the familiar scent of flavoured coffee woke me and he saw my eyes opening, he brought a mug of steaming liquid paradise over. He challenged me not to spill it while he teased me, edged me under the sheets, trying to make me lose my grip.

I've never dropped the mug, but I wonder what would have happened if I did. Would he have given me a big spanking on my naked butt? Maybe our story would have turned out differently because maybe, unbeknown to me, I already craved something like that, something other than a polite gentleman, something other than missionary. Maybe we would have lasted longer than that autumn. My still juvenile mind labelled him ‘boring’ and in the winter when the roads were becoming difficult to drive, I decided it was time to break up with him.

After him, I dated a long line of wildlings, an artist who painted beautiful colours on my body and soul but who dressed as a hobo wearing the same old, ripped t-shirt for a week. Then a surfer with a bronzed body of a sex god and flexibility, to work my body the same way he worked the waves but eventually returning to his true love, the ocean and I couldn’t follow him.

No one ever treated me like Rob did.

These days, when my life is like an explosion site, I could kill for that serenity, for a man like Robert. I’ve given up a long time ago and now I’m numb to the chaos; I’m sipping my salted caramel latte, silently watching my preteens having a fight over the bottle of real Canadian maple syrup (which Rob was a big fan of), spilling the £7 liquid gold all over my brand-new stag tablecloth, with the tiny monster joining in flinging pancakes at them, giggling.

I wish I had a Rob in my life I could escape to. Maybe I would tell him how I burned the first three (ok, six) pancakes and he could spank me with the wooden spoon for being so useless in the kitchen and teach me how it’s done and how not to be such a scatter-brain. Uhm, yes, that would be lovely. I think it’s time to go on some dating site and see if that kind of man still exists somewhere, in some secret, hidden corner of the universe.