Just when you thought it was safe

For as long as I can remember here on the Rust we have featured the absurdities thrown up by media reports upon innumerable academic research projects that have been conducted into the most ridiculous of subjects and/or survey results that seem to have come up with the most ludicrous of conclusions.

Making hay from such easy targets might be said by some to be irrefutable evidence of either an editorial team’s lack of enterprise and imagination or alternatively, its sloth. I couldn’t possibly comment – or maybe it’s a case of not being bothered enough by the accusation to do so.

Anyway, to my text of the day – a report by Nicola Davis on research by the University of Michigan in the USA which has apparently discovered that, contrary to widely-held received opinion that passion wanes as our  free bus passes approach, sexual activity remains a key component of life for all those aged over 65, as appears today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN

About fifty years ago I remember standing beside my father at a cocktail party that he and my mother were hosting when the female member of a local couple that were well enough known to us that (in combined family contingents) we frequently went on skiing and other holidays together joined us.

For some reasons, as is the way of the world, among the topics that were raised as we passed the ten or so minutes together in a group, was sexual intercourse.

Aged seventeen at the time, I had by then fortunately already been through the awkward phase of teenagehood where – whilst being thankful, of course, that one’s parents had indulged sufficiently to produce oneself – the merest thought that one’s parents had ever been ‘at it’ was simply (as they say in modern parlance) a form of ‘too much information’ that prompted an involuntary retch of “Yeeeuuh!” and a collective shiver of the spine in everyone, male or female, of one’s own vintage.

Instead I was now (I felt) adult and mature enough – as by then were my parents, who had gone through their own phase of shying away from any mention of sex in any context in front of their children, to address the subject with something resembling mutual respect.

This transformation, or indeed ‘journey’, a heart-warming affair in many ways – when I was looking back on the issue at some point in the 1970s – had incidentally begun for my parents exactly as poet Philip Larkin had memorably identified in his poem Annus Mirabilis:

‘Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.’

[My point here being that ironically the advent of the Beatles’ first album Please Please Me was not only the moment at which my parents first appreciated – as indeed probably did I – that sex was a perfectly normal and natural human activity/interest, but also (in their case) first appreciated that music produced by crooners under the age of forty – or indeed not featuring first in their favourite West End or Broadway musicals – could possibly be worth listening to, life-enhancing and thought-provoking.]

Anyway, back to the cocktail party scene I was describing …

I cannot recall how our three-way conversation got there, but suddenly my father and this lady friend of the family were discussing sex. At one point she passed comment that my father – whom (she added) was regarded by those females she knew as being as sexually-attractive as the next man, if in fact not more so – must have enjoyed the company of a healthy number of ladies in his time.

He then harrumphed in an abashed “I don’t know about that” sort of away and replied “Well all I know is that, even if I was to have sex every day for the rest of my life, I still wouldn’t have had my fair share …”

To which the lady responded – in a manner which I have felt ever since said both very little and also a very great deal about her and indeed British society attitudes at the time – “But you must have, Tom – you’ve got three kids …”

In concluding my blog today, I simply wanted to record my frustration at research findings such as those I have brought to my readers’ attention today (see above).

Having spent the past fifty-odd years suffering from the same deprivation as my father, I had been rather relieved to have reached my seventh decade and the point at which – I was convinced – my peers generally would be no longer concerned with matters of the flesh and therefore I would tend to ‘fit in’ more than hitherto.

[I am reminded here of the teaching of St Augustine – as once relayed to me by a schoolmaster, so it may or may not have been 100% accurate, or perhaps my recall of it may not have been – who apparently described the state of celibacy as being the highest standard that man (or woman) could ever aspire to, albeit that in his own case he wasn’t planning to reach it until old age when he would no longer be afflicted by sexual desire anyway.]

But to my final comment for today.

It’s just my luck that, having reached my seventh decade and thinking that from now on I could relax, I suddenly now discover that everyone around me – including your author – are now expected to be ‘at it’ like rabbits …