Thrust, thrust, thrust. Bang, bang, bang. I’ve been listening to this for the past four evenings. Two people sweating and panting in the room above, in a hotel too close to a busy road, which serves spaghetti that is cold as it hits the plate.

I’m sharing a twin room with my mother – hoping to God she isn’t hearing this too. But I know she is, because in the darkness the shape of the room changes when she sits up in bed.

I have never wanted to die more. I text my friend: “I have never wanted to die more.”

The people fucking above me are ruining any chance I have of looking mother in the eye again.

I go to the bathroom, as if that could make what’s about to happen any more comfortable. The woman I’m sleeping with and I start attempting to sext. But it’s difficult because the Wi-Fi keeps cutting out, and then I have to sign in all over again, using a password that is a long string of numbers, like a PGP key, which I save in my phone after the cleaner over-zealously binned the piece of paper with it written on.

Autocorrect keeps changing “clit” to “clot”. At one point, near to the edge, my sister texts, and I also get a delayed notification from Oxford Mail about traffic in Woodstock.

I don’t think of myself as a sexter. It’s not something I think is a sell, particularly: 25, GSOH, keen sexter. I don’t have areolas that strain to get free in the periphery of a lens. I had a little phase of mutually Snapchatting nude selfies with a woman I used to date, except hers came from a Mexican beach and mine from a one-bed flat in Kentish Town.

She didn’t realise I was notified every time she took a screenshot of my Snapchats, which was always. When she did realise, she texted me, mortified.

Kids these days are all about sexting, all about porn on phones. It’s disturbing that a quarter of kids have viewed porn by the age of 12. This world promotes a skewed, commercial perspective of sex that contains none of the dead legs, none of the – I’m sorry, I’m gonna use the word queefing – nothing about ingrown hairs or penises that curve. When I was younger, the boys in my class would talk about catching snippets of Eurotrash. I basically learned it was OK to wank because of Kim Cattrall in Sex and the City.

There are not too many naked selfies in my camera roll then. One of the worst experiences I have had with tech, apart from the time I lost 30,000 words of the “novel” I was writing (it was for the best), was when the friend of someone I was involved with stumbled across photographs of us on my phone. It happened on a hot day, during a picnic . I can imagine her cupping her hands to shield the sun’s glare and being horrified.

As for parents, they used to hide knives and keys and alcohol from their kids – now they hide phones using a lock time of longer than five minutes.

I’m not good at this stuff. It worries me. I used to work with a woman who had her phone stolen, and the thieves uploaded nude pictures of her to her Facebook account. Her boss, her friends, her parents all saw them. Look at what happened to Jennifer Lawrence, who didn’t upload naked photos of herself to the internet, but had her Apple iCloud account hacked. Then there’s the whole sordid, morally decrepit business of revenge porn.

The next night I consider sending a picture to the woman I’m sleeping with, but I can’t decide on a filter. Amaro? Too bright. Hefe? Makes my sunburn look worse. X-Pro II? Resembles an outtake from some kind of straight-to-DVD sci-fi porn flick.

I’m pretty sure dagouerrotypes weren’t as difficult. Saucy letters written in quill ink and spritzed with perfume were a safer bet. Pretty sure Prince Charles’s tampon comment put everybody off phone sex for life, back in the days when landlines were a thing.

I don’t even know how people in long-distance relationships cope. Encrypted chat apps? Skype? (A journalist friend, who shall remain nameless but remains a hero, once conducted an interview via Skype, and in the middle of it, bored and scoopless, slipped her vibrator out of her bedroom drawer and went to town).

I’m glad I don’t have to think about it. About the camera angles, or the appropriate punctuation, or whether a safe word translates via iMessage. Give me the real thing. Take the phone off the hook and give me the thrusting and the panting and the banging. Just not when my mother’s in the bed next to me. Dear God, not then.

Are you a fan of sexting? Is it just a part of a healthy relationship in 2015? Leave your comments below.