Health and relationships
It’s an open secret that the editorial board of the Rust rarely meets in person, conducting as it does most of its business via the modern technological marvel of the internet.
However, it is also metaphorically true that – at our editorial ‘gatherings’ over the ether – nothing invites more jocular internal derision and ribbing than that traditional old standby of Fleet Street’s summer months and occasional solitary ‘slow news’ days, the whimsical piece built upon the topics of either sex or some high-faultin’ and faux-solemn piece supposed straight reporting of recently-published obscure academic research that has concluded something really weird and/or so bleedin’ obvious that even the Rust’s office runner could have invented it as an April Fool’s Day prank.
The above goes part-way to explain why your author embarks this contribution to the Rust cannon with a degree of trepidation – especially since his topic de jour involves both sex and semi-whacko academic research offerings.
See here for health reporter Alexandra Thompson’s cornucopia round-robin of recent academic research findings from around the world tending to support the age-old maxim that having sex is good for the general health of all human beings – DAILY MAIL
Sadly, for good or ill, scanning down the list of items covered, my mind wandered for a moment to consider the funniest or silliest incidents/comments I have encountered over the decades, including the following [some readers might feel mercifully short list of] examples.
Fifty years ago, incarcerated in the wilds of the countryside at an all-boys public school at which the concept of Muscular Christianity very definitely held sway, one of the ordeals for both housemasters and we testosterone-filled adolescent pupils was the intensely ‘awkward’ man-to-man conversation about the dangers of self-abuse.
Tales, myths and legends of just how awkward and hilarious some of these encounters became used to be exchanged as avidly as the old-fashioned cigarette cards of famous cricketers around the school, to wit:
As a Remove student (in my school, the year before A levels) a pal and I were comparing notes upon our own experiences.
Mine, as something of a sports fanatic, was with a timid, balding, unathletic assistant housemaster in his fifties who could barely force himself to raise the subject, or indeed look at me, during our ten-minute talk and who spent the bulk of our time together fiddling with the tassels on the end of the crimson tablecloth beside his armchair as he tentatively skirted around the issue.
His considered best tactic in my case was for him to seek to appeal to my school sports team mentality. I cannot now recall the word he used to described the act of masturbation but he counselled me that I should avoid it ‘on the night before a 1st XV match’ because of its supposed inevitable tendency to adversely affect the stamina reserves of a male for up to 24 hours afterwards.
[It was about this time that George Best had boasted on TV in some interview that the closest he’d ever had sex to the kick-off at a Manchester United game was about 90 minutes].
My friend exchanged that one for his own tale which I must take at face value because of our friendship although – thinking about it, simply because he was describing his own quip – I suppose he could just as easily have made it up.
During his ‘awkward’ talk with his own housemaster, his companion had been extemporising upon a similar theme [i.e. the deleterious effect upon stamina of self-abuse on the night before a game] and alighted upon the intendedly off-putting ‘fact’ that such an act was the biological equivalent of a six-mile cross-country run.
To which my pal had allegedly replied “Well, sir – if that’s the case, I must be one of the fittest boys in the entire house!”
Next, back during my second term at said school the age of thirteen there was one hulking permanently-half asleep brute in my class with a permanent fuzz on his chin and a bass voice who was once introduced during a round-robin ‘reading French aloud’ lesson by the wonderfully witty French master thus: “ … And now over to you, Simpson-Brown, the boy with the mind of a six-year-old and the body of an eighteen year old …”, which had the entire class, including Simpson-Brown himself, howling with laughter.
To finish with, a short story which may tell something of how men think (or at least how women think men think) recounted to me by my first wife.
Her previous boyfriend-but one to me had been a medical student. His initial best attempt at a chat-up – perhaps I should have said ‘seduction’ – technique, over something like a candlelit dinner in a swish London restaurant, had been to list all the beneficial effects of sexual intercourse upon the male body [presumably recently learned in one of his lectures] and then beg her to go back to his flat that evening to save him from the adverse effects of him not actually having had sex for quite some time!
