Category Archives: Sex, possibly litigious references to

Beatherder

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I went to a festival recently for the first time in a few years. Clearly it’s taken that length of time for me to forget a very important point- I would happily kill 95% of people at any given festival. I’m sure they’re all nice and lovely the rest of the time when their enagaged with normal grinding reality like the rest of us- but stick them in a field with a soundsystem, 48 cans of Stella and access to some industral strength ketamine and everything goes horribly, horribly wrong. They begin communicating at the sort of volume usually associated with a jumbo jet crashing on take-off and decide that 5am is the appropriate time to begin an interpetation of Massive Attack tunes on the bongos to impress a posh girl called something like Iffy.

And these are people I just paid £70 to spend a weekend camping with.

Incredibly, I still had a brilliant time. This is mainly due to the company of friends I don’t see often enough who through a combination of humour, love and understanding managed to smooth the edges off the seething rage that festival people pump into the dense black gloop that’s where my soul should be. Thanks for that guys. Appreciate it.

I was also helped by the fact that festival was everything that Glastonbury always promised to be. Impressive, really, considering that it was a festival called Beatherder I was at and not Glastonbury.

I’ve been down to the big one at Pilton a couple of times and it was great- although as an event it’s so smug and in love with itself that, for one weekend per year, it briefly overtakes Manchester as the cockiest, most-likely-to-harp-on-about-it’s-inherent-greatness place in the UK. If it could fellate itself, it would snap it’s wonderful, oh-so-cool neck doing it.

Glastonbury is brilliant, no doubt, but it likes to present this image as an insane bacchanale of decadence and music where anything can happen. Rumours always ping around the festival like Twitter after it’s received a blow to the head: “Paul McCartney and Neil Young are in the acoustic tent at 4pm!”, “I’ve just seen Kurt Cobain eat a falafel during The White Lies set”, “Glenn Miller’s plane just crashed through a timehole- he’s playing on the Pyramid Stage with Slash”- that sort of thing. The chinese whispers about what’s going on in the awful, rubbish, not-at-Glastonbury outside world are even more insane. Apparently, when news spread about Michael Jackson’s death last year it took about 30 minutes flat for the rumour to mutate into news of every single celebrity called Michael having passed away in the night; Barrymore, Buerk, Jordan, McIntyre, Portillo in a freak yachting tragedy etc, etc. And what really happens that’s a surprise? Bugger all.

Oh, and those festival twats I mentioned earlier? There’s 175,000 of the fuckers.

The truth about Glastonbury, and what actually makes it great, is that it’s lots of bands you’ve heard of playing tightly scheduled sets to ensure they get some coverage on the BBC. That and the fact that Lauren Laverne’s there.

Beatherder, this past weekend, meanwhile turned out to herald all the unexpected insanity that Glasto had to stop having when they let the BBC film it and had to put up a massive fence to stop every baghead in Europe from getting in and ransacking tents. Here’s just three things I saw there this year:

- A stall honest enough to advertise that it sells ‘Shit Cameras’
- A talent competition won by a human-beatboxer and judged by, among others, a drag queen and the woman who plays Janice Battersby on Coronation Street.
- A main stage guest appearance from GMTV’s leotard-toting Mr Motivator which featured backing dancing by a friend of mine dressed as Bertie Bassett

This is what festivals are meant to do; remove us from everyday and let us experience a different reality for the weekend. One where there’s lots of drinking, loads of live music and remarkably few consequences. Unfortunately, this also means experiencing the reality of life in a refugee camp for a few days, albeit a refugee camp where half the residents have gorged themselves on cheap speed and spend their time tripping over guy ropes and walking past tents fruitlessly yelling “DAZ!” at the top of their lungs in the hope of finding their friend who went off to have sex with that posh girl called Iffy because, disgracefully, in this alternate festival reality playing Massive Attack on the bongos in a drug induced stupor at 5am actually does get you laid.

And then instead of bongos you’re listening to sweaty tent-rutting for 3 hours as Daz bangs away at Iffy with admirable tenacity yet few results as his substance-addled brain has forgotten to tell his testicles what to do and Iffy passed out in the early stages anyway. The fucking degenerate scum. Maybe one day he’ll rut right through her pelvis and I’ll be woken by the glorious sound of Daz charging round the campsite as his mind finally caves in with all the horror while Iffy flails around in muted agony looking for her severed legs. The shits. The absolute rotting shits.

Er… Anyway, I had a point, can’t remember what it was now.

Um… yeah… I went to a festival this weekend. It was great. I’m just not sure why.

No Sex Please, We’re Reading

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“This was not soft porn. This was no longer two unclothed women caressing and kissing on a bed. There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be. There was something dangerous about it. His heart thumped with excitement – the god Pan looking on from a distance with his spying, lascivious gaze.”

And that bit doesn’t even mention the huge green dildo…

The above passage is Philip Roth’s entry (no pun inteded) in this year’s Literary Review Bad Sex Award- a trinket designed to “draw attention to the cruse, tasteless… passages of sexual description in the modern novel”.  It’s also the one award that usually affords new up-and-coming novellists the chance to take on the true heavyweights of their field.  A chap called Anthony Quinn, for instance, is on this year’s list for his debut novel which means he’s gone from writing film reviews for The Independent to duking it out with both a legend like Roth and Australian doom-monger/Droopy impersonator Nick Cave for an award which only 2 years ago was posthumously scooped by Norman Mailer.

The sheer breadth of talent and experience on display in the list (Richard Milward’s ‘Ten Storey Love Song’- another nominee- might be the worst book ever written) just goes to prove one thing for certain- nobody, no matter who they are, should ever attempt to write about the sexual act.

Ever.

Returning to Roth as an example, he’s had half a century to nail (no pun intended) a decent description of sex since he wrote “her breasts swam towards me like two pink-nosed fish and she let me hold them” in ‘Goodbye, Columbus‘ but as his most recent attempt demonstrates, all he’s really been able to do in 50 years is ramp up the deranged imagery and filter everything through what appears to be either a compound nervous breakdown or a major psychotic episode.

The basic problem appears to be this:  the author wishing to describe the act of physical sex-doing is going to have to confront some intense physical and mental sensations achieved via some frankly ludicrous bodily actions by the participants.  Removed from the pleasure of involvement or the onanistic joys of watching attractive people enjoying it, sex is a mostly preposterous activity involving thrusting, odd primal noises and face pulling that wouldn’t look out of place in a documentary about people having their feet run over by heavy machinery.

A writer is therefore faced with a stark choice.  Option 1 is to write about sex with brutal frankness and simplicity.  This would make a novel feel like a school biology textbook and therefore be about as erotic as the instructions for assembling a piece of flat-pack furniture that begin with ‘insert rod A into slot B and secure with nuts provided’ (no pun intended)

Option 2 meanwhile involves cloaking the description with similes, metaphors and symbolism until it resembles less an erotically charged missive from Planet Orgasm and more the demented ramblings of a couped-up prisoner of war who’s spent 4 solid decades thinking constantly about a shag but has had nothing but a dusty hole in the ground and a potato sack on which to take out his frenzied yearnings.  This is the approached favoured by most writers and of which Roth’s earlier passage is a particularly fine example.

Neither of these options seems particularly viable or attractive and that’s why I feel that, while the bad sex award is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t go nearly far enough.  Any description of sex in novels should henceforth be banned before any other truly great writer like Philip Roth shags up their reputation (no pun intended) by claiming that women involved in sex acts with huge green dildoes are also wearing masks on their fannies.

In defence of the art of writing about sex, Richard Milward (he of the appalling ‘Ten Storey Love Song’) said that “some authors spend five pages describing a walk in the park but when it comes to sex they’ll just do two sentences- ‘she rolled off him’.  Sex is exciting stuff- it can be very dirty and smelly.  But you’ve got to get stuck in”.

No pun intended.

Leaving aside his descrpition of sex as ‘smelly’ in the folder marked ‘Too Much Information’, Milward totally misses the point about what should and shouldn’t be described.  If a couple in a novel actually have sex the reader’s imagination should be able to fill in the blanks, as it were, rather than the author ruining everything with a combination of cack-handed imagery and punishing detail.  To illustrate my point, let’s turn to the world of film.

It might be a cliche to say it, but cinema doesn’t get any more erotic and powerful that the image of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling around on the beach in From Here to Eternity.  They are utterly consumed with each other and, let’s be frank here, it’s clearly the prelude to the best shag in the world.  Lancaster is about to do things to Kerr that none of us would be proud of but which will live with both of them forever.  It’s gonna get nasty.  There’ll be animal noises.  It might hurt.  Your imaginations can fill in the rest (provided their like mine that is)

But does the film show us this?  No.  We just get the kiss in the sand, not the eye-watering fuck-fest that inevitably follows.  And that’s why it’s such an erotically charged moment.  Fast forward 40 years and cinema’s desperate attempts to be erotic involved filming right up  Sharon Stone’s skirt so you could see her lady regions.  Even without the fat bloke from Seinfeld and Jurassic Park sweating away it wasn’t in the slightest bit erotic or arousing.  It was just a fanny.

But at least it wasn’t wearing a mask.

To The Moon And Back For Valentine’s Day

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Are you aware that you can be extradited to the United States of America for possession of moondust? It all stems from the fact that the U.S. Government declared any of this particular substance was illegal for the public to the own and, since the Yanks are the only ones to have ever visited Earth’s near neighbour, anyone possessing any is committing a crime against the American nation no matter whereabouts on the planet they do it. Or, for that matter, if they grab hold of any on the Moon itself. An intriguing subtext to all this is that if the Chinese go to the Moon in the near future they’ll technically be declaring war on the States.

Whilst I’m on the subject- it’s worth pointing out that Moon rock is easily the most hallucinatory substance in existence- you don’t even need to ingest any of it to have your head well and truly bent out of shape. A fragment of moon rock weighing just 0.2g was once sold for $442,500 and- in a breathtaking example of genuine psychedelic mania- a stolen-and-recovered piece of lunar debris which had originally been a gift to the people of Honduras was the subject of a civil court case in 2003 which was entitled, and I’m not making this up, “United States of America Vs One Moon Rock and One Ten Inch by Fourteen Inch Plaque”. If you’re interested, the United States won.

There’s actually very little about America’s relationship with the Moon that isn’t deeply surreal. Any visitors to Buzz Aldrin’s home will apparently be treated to a viewing of a framed NASA travel voucher that covered his expenses in mid-July 1969. It reads “Payee’s Name: Col. Edwin E. Aldrin 00018; From: Houston, Texas; To: Cape Kennedy, Florida -to- Moon -to- Pacific Ocean; Amount Claimed $33.31″ There are those who say the Moon landings were faked- but there’s absolutely no way anyone could have made that up.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a country like America would claim travelling expenses to a place in history or make an attempt to sue a geological feature from another planet. They are, as we shall see on Saturday, the nation that turned an ancient, endearingly bonkers and staunchly parochial festival of romantic devotion into a soulfree, desolate and- worst of all- blandly universal trudge through the twin cackpools of cliche and duty.

It would seem obvious that Valentine’s Day is a depressing event for those bereft of romantic entanglement but it’s infinitely worse if you actually have someone who, so tradition dictates, should be celebrated on the day. Nowadays, these festivities are limited to just a couple of options- either trot out for an over-priced three course meal and bottle of fizzy pink wine in a restaurant which has simply clogged itself with heart-shaped balloons for the occasion; or have a night-in which will inevitably feature the man of the couple yelling at a still-born attempt at a Gordon Ramsey recipe and the woman accepting that no claims of a headache are going to get her out of doing some sex that night.

Modern Valentine’s Day stems from an American, Esther Howland, noting the quaint British tradition of sending notes to loved ones on the 14th of February and deciding to mass-produce them and make a fortune, which she duly did. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but of all the Valentine’s Day traditions that she could have picked from anywhere in the world to exploit she really did plump for the dullest of the bunch.

Imagine if, instead, she’d have been the spear-head behind a rebirth of the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia- which was celebrated around February 14th in honour of the She-Wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus. During this festival, various men of the city would sacrifice two goats and a dog, make whips from their flesh and then, during a massive feast, charge naked up and down the city streets striking the women of the city- who queued up willingly- with their animal-skin weapons in order to boost their fertility. All that survives in the modern world from this, the original Valentine’s Day celebration, is the date of the occasion and everyone going out for a meal.

If the idea of reviving Lupercalia this Saturday seems a little off-putting to the ladies, who- if we’re honest- do seem these days to be less inclined to getting whipped with the skin of a goat by nude men in a town centre, then how’s about we go back to an idea established in Paris on Valentine’s Day 1400 and let the fairer sex set-up the ‘High Court of Love’. This particular phenomenon, possibly the most French thing to have ever occurred in history, saw the women of the city set up a fully functioning court to deal with betrayals against members of their gender by men who were then punished accordingly. Intriguingly, the women who ran these courts appointed men as the judges based on examples of their writing and a poetry recital- thereby combining the holy triptych of chav-friendly television; ‘Judge Judy’, ‘The Jeremy Kyle Show’ and ‘The X Factor’ in one neat package centuries before ITV was even though of.

So, I implore you, this year- instead of the jaded, listless modern Valentine’s which was dreamed up all those years ago just to make Esther Howland rich, let’s get back to the old school and do it properly. Men- get naked, get some goats and get whipping. Women- take your goat-whipping with glee then adjourn a court to sort out any man who’s ever screwed you over with the full force of your own law’s sweet fury. Let’s make February 14th a day to celebrate again- a joy, not an obligation. Oh, and by the way, if any ladies out there do decide to bring back these love courts and you need a judge, consider this my application.

Though bear in mind that if someone’s given you moondust for Valentine’s Day, I’m going to have to extradite you.

There Is A Light, It’s Going Out…

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Imagine careering through a portal and ending up a few centuries in the future. Go on, imagine it. I’m not going to sit here and describe in searing detail the mind-boggling sensation of hurtling through time. Sod that. You’ll just have to imagine it for yourselves instead- it’s about time you lot started doing some of the work round here. Go on.

Done it? Good. Just so we’re all singing off the same hymn sheet- when you arrive in the future you’d feel something like Charlton Heston does in Planet of the Apes. Only without the apes.

Now imagine wandering down the future streets in your future shoes past a future Starbucks as future teens play future music on their tinny, nasty future mobile phones (some things, alas, never change). As you walk along you happen upon a big imposing building cheerily proclaiming itself to be a ‘Museum of the Past’. It could be doing this via the medium of a great big sign or the building itself could be proclaiming it by talking directly to you through some big masonry mouth. This is the future after all.

Intrigued, you wander through the entrance, past the gift shop, and take a look around. What would you expect to see when you happened upon the area dedicated to the early 21st century? What would they be commemorating from the Noughties? While you ponder this, bear in mind that museums often adopt a faintly patronising tone towards the obsolete practices and artefacts of the past- almost chuckling with incredulity at, for instance, medieval doctors trying to cure the plague with a bunch of posies and a big stick and wondering why they didn’t just google the answer instead.

This is what I think you’d see: a waxwork figurine of Jeremy Clarkson playing tapes of him doing lots of those pregnant pauses he does….. at the end of sentences; an X-Box 360 with Guitar Hero III on a constant loop of Leona Lewis songs; a mock Hygena kitchen featuring male and female figurines crying over a mortgage statement to the strains of Dizee Rascal’s ‘Dance Wit Me’ and, in a sealed, alarmed vial protected by lasers and guns, there’ll be a tiny amount of genuine, precious water as a testament to the time before it was all used up and people had to start using a system whereby rain and nourishment are downloaded off i-Tunes.

And in amongst all this there’ll be a large display dedicated to a strange human phenomenon that will have been finally killed off around the year 2010. It’ll amuse and baffle the residents of the future who will never have experienced the particular sensation described within and will merely be able to read the accompanying notes- all the while gazing upon a vista that contains details not only on how this thing felt but also how it was battered out of existence around the turn of the Millennium.

And the title of the exhibit will be ‘Romance’.

Let’s be perfectly honest with each other here- romance is very nearly dead. It’s as outdated and outmoded as steam engines, smallpox and bands with ugly but talented drummers. This state of affairs is a particular tragedy in this country as, despite what the French or Italians would have you believe, the Brits were once the most romantic nation on Earth. Just look at our movies if you don’t believe me. I dare you to watch ‘Brief Encounter’ or ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ or ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ or ‘Gregory’s Girl’ or ‘Room At The Top’ or ‘The Go-Between’ and tell me that the understatement so traditionally inherent in the people of this island- our charming brand of emotional retardation- didn’t make for romance to be, quietly, a central pillar of our very national existence. I say quietly because romance doesn’t scream from the rooftops. Instead romance creeps up on you from nowhere, romance whispers sweet nothings, romance is- in the nicest possible way- just a voice in your head. Romance, most of all, is mystery.

And mystery just can’t be tolerated any more.

Take, for example, The Jeremy Kyle Show- a daily chavapalooza of screeching involving couples comprised of alcoholics and the eletcronically-tagged arguing over the parenthood of their children. I know a number of people who say they love the show and if you’re one of those people and, whether you’re being ironic or not, I want to address this next bit directly to you:

You are a pillock. We may be friends, we may have spoken warmly in the past and shared good times but, and I really, really mean this, you’re everything that’s wrong with the world and you should be uttery ashamed. Seriously. If this is what you call entertainment then you are single-handedly reversing 2 million years of human evolution. You are that dumb. You are that pathetic. You are everything that is wrong with everything. And you owe me a tenner.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show (I’m talking to everyone again now. Welcome back. How’ve you been? You didn’t miss much), it often features a couple from a council estate going through a DNA test to prove how much bovine sex the man (and I use that term loosely) or woman (and I’m barely adhering to that term at all) of the pair has been having. I don’t know about you, but a DNA test really takes the romance out of a relationship. In terms of loving gestures it’s on a par with spending three solid weeks bellowing into your partner’s ear that they smell of eggs. But Kyle’s Bear-pit Theatre is merely the most denegrating part of a recent movement which has lead me to picture romance being nothing more in the future than a museum exhibit referenced in an overlong introduction by a man who loves the sound of his own keyboard.

There is, quite simply, too much stuff in the world that needs to be filled. It used to be a couple of television channels, a few newspapers and the occasional book that needed creative input but now everything’s gone digital and, alongside all the stations on your Sky+ box, there’s also a great big internet out there which constantly expands to accomodate an ever growing torrent of irrelevant, pointless cack. This used to just mean a dishonourable band of ham-fisted blogs but now sites like MySpace and in particular the one you’re reading this on have lead the tiniest minutiae of everybody’s life to be broadcast through the ether as though anyone else honestly gives a flying one.

Don’t get me wrong- Facebook is a good thing in so many ways. It’s allowed me to find out which of my schoolfriends grew up to be hot or work in I.T. and the opportunity to see photos of my nearest and dearest having much more fun that I ever seem to do is always likely to warm the cockles. But should I ever need to find romance again this website would kill it off with all the dead-eyed efficiency of Predator on performance-related pay.

Let me put it this way- I’m old fashioned. Without going into too much detail, my relationship with the missus began with a genuine courtship; much like they tend to do in Jane Austen novels and contrived American sit-coms. It’s a period of my life I look back on with intense joy as a time when two people slowly got to know each other and realised that something, somewhere, somehow seemed to make a connection. And that, my friends, is what happens when you embrace a bit of mystery in your life.

If we were to meet now, however, only the first couple of days would be the same as we started chatting over a bar in Sunderland. Then, in 2008, we’d simply add each other as friends on Facebook and, within mere moments, be able to see each others’ political views, religious beliefs, favourite books, status as of 5 seconds ago and previous performances on copyright-infringing Scrabble games. Years worth of discovery would be packed into a quick browse around a webpage and then, if this was you, where could you go from there?

I’ll tell you where. You’d miss that period of finding out about your beloved and then start inventing things to find out about them that didn’t even exist. You’d ponder if they’re actually a convicted sex offender, or an abscodned member of the Thrid Reich with a talented plastic surgeon, or one of those lizard people David icke keeps banging on about. Then you’d be just a small step away from claiming your significant other has banged everyone you share a postcode with and before you know it you’d be sat in front of Jeremy Kyle’s cackling bovine audience as he lorded it over you with the results of a DNA test.

This is the future. I hope you’ll be happy.

For Britain…

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You’ll no doubt now be aware that Team GB’s perfromance (when did we get that Americanised name all of a sudden?) at last year’s Olympics was the best in a century. Pretty impressive but it looks like, in terms of historical context, we may have plateaued. While we ended up knocking on the door of 20 gold medals in Beijing, 1908 saw Great Britain collect a whopping 56 golds. By the end of those games, our entire team must have been blinged up like Snoop Dog in a particularly auspicious mood.

However, there’s no reason to think that we couldn’t match this staggering success next time- becuase the 1908 Olympics thook place, like those of 2012 will do, in London. And, looking back at the old records, it appears the hosts took more than a few liberties with the events that were included in order to tip the balance in Blighty’s favour. For instance, that old village fete favourite the tug of war made an appearance, as did rugby union though, intriguingly, the USA took the title and remain current Olympic champions in the sport- remember that for the pub quiz. The shooting events involved killing live deer like a typical country gent and, best of all, we also included two ancient racket sports; one actually called ‘rackets’ and the other called ‘real tennis’, both of which were about as old as Henry VIII and had been for their entire histories played almost exclusively on these isles. We claimed gold, silver and bronze in both events which is hardly surpising as no-one from any other countries even bothered entering.

Clearly, the organisers of 1908 could show Seb Coe and friends how to go about throwing together an Olympics in four years time where Britannia can truly rule the waves. And the pool, the track, the velodrome and, just for the hell of it, the real tennis court (surely it’s due a revival- there’s still somewhere to play it at Hampton Court apparently). All we need to do is come up with a few events where the odds are stacked in favour of the British, though if we just start making queueing and binge drinking into Olympic sports the rest of the world might twig that we’re up to something. Therefore, being a considerate chap, I’ve put together a few ways in which some existing sports could be tweaked to help out Team GB a little bit:

Swimming: All competitors have to start each race with a pint of Stella in a plastic glass which they must carry with them. While the race will still be timed, penalties will be incurred for the amount of beverage spilt (let’s say- one second per 5ml) with the best overall time deciding the standings. Anyone who’s seen a British man relaxing with a pint in a pool in a foreign hotel notice some teenage French girls playing volleyball in the deep end will surely have marvelled at his ability to front crawl over to them with his plastic glass between his teeth and not lose a single drop. Surely it’s about time this discipline was given the opportunity to take to a bigger stage.

Athletics: For all running races, a newly constructed Primark will be placed at the finish line. When the starting gun goes, the store will open and begin advertising a sale. All British women will instantly be able to charge down the track at Mach 3 just to be first through the doors, though we may need to change the rules so that barging, punching and some stabbing is allowed.

Gymnastics: All falls and bad landings to be accomapnied by hilarious soundtrack of ‘BOING!’ noises and such like, in order to make everything more audience friendly. British competitors to be drawn entirely from winners of the Pride of Britain award- thereby creating invincible combination of slapstick and heart wrenching sob-stories with the winner of the event not to be decided by professional gymnastics judges but by a phone vote on Saturday night ITV hosted by Joe Pasquale and Fern Britten (note to organsiers- make sure Pasquale handles the funny noises and Britten does the sob-stories or it could all go a bit tits up)

Cycling: British team to just turn up as this is something we can actually give the whole world a good twatting in. That said, deciding that the event should be contested entirely by 16 year old chavs on BMX bikes designed for 9 year olds couldn’t hurt.

Boxing: Venue switched to just outside the Adelphi Public House on Blackburn Boulevard. Glassing allowed.

Additional Note: All sports to be accompanied by a looping soundtrack of ‘Run’ by Snow Patrol and McFly songs played a three times normal speed.

There you go- just a few simple changes and suddenly we’re cleaning up every gold medal in sight. However, there is one more thing we need to take care of- we need to stop the athletes shagging. At the Sydney and Athens Olympics, organisers supplied over 30,000 condoms to the visiting competitors and ran out by about a week into proceedings, whereas in Beijing not even a third of the total supply of sheaths has been used and we’ve nearly hit the fortnight mark. The only reason I can find to explain what happened is that in 2000 and 2004, all the Brits were busy banging their brains out rather than dealing with the sporting matters at hand. They were acting like typical Brits abroad really and I dare say that at those games the phrase ‘silver medal’ referred to a messy sexual aftermath rather than coming second (though it could have meant both if you think about it). This needs to be prevented from happening in London four years from now

The only way to achieve this spell of celebacy for Team GB would be, as far as I can tell, to get Sir David Beckham (as he probably will be by 2012) to tell the entire nation not to have sex for the total duration of the games. We’ll all dutifully bow our heads at his Royal Right-Footedeness and go about our days with our fluids slowly building to dangerous levels. Then, when its all over and Britain has won 40,000 gold medals, we can all celebrate with a great big national shag.

On Saturday night ITV. Hosted by Joe Pasquale (for the funny noises) and Fern Britten (for the sob stories). Accompanied by a looping soundtrack of ‘Run’ by Snow Patrol and McFly songs played a three times normal speed.

COME ON BRITAIN!

Collision Course

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You know that special person? You’ve got one- everyone does. They might not necessarily be the person you share your bed with at night, your nearest and dearest. They might be a friend for whom your love is unrequited. They might be the one that got away all those years ago. They might be the mythically beautiful person you see on the bus every morning. You might never have even met them. But there’s someone, somewhere who gets your heart pounding and your mind racing. Someone who does for you the best thing anyone can do for another person- they make you feel, for want of a better word, funny.

Think of that person. Now, tell them how you feel. Go on. Do it. Find the way to track them down and let them know, right now, that there’s someone in the world for them and that someone is you. Tell them now, I’ll wait here for you. And be quick about it.

Because you’re about to die.

The harbinger of your impending doom, like so little else in human history, comes from Switzerland and goes by the rather bland name of ‘The Large Hadron Collider’. Essentially, it’s a 17 mile circular tunnel 100 metres below the Franco-Swiss border which is currently in the process of being cooled to -271.25 degrees centigrade. When this is done, the scientists who run it will then start firing beams of protons in opposite directions round the tunnel and make them crash into each other, thereby replicating conditions that prevailed within a few millionths-of-a-second of the Big Bang. And the reason they’re doing all this is to test their current model of particle physics which, as they put it themselves, “is known to break down at a certain energy level”.

Let’s go through that again. A bunch of men in white coats realise that a very important theory of how absolutely everything fits together at the most minute level breaks in certain extreme conditions. ‘Extreme conditions’ being, in this case, an alternative way of saying ‘The Big Bang’. They therefore have decided to recreate those exact same conditions or ‘Big Bang’ in a great big underground tunnel and just see what happens. Oh, and it’ll all happen at light-speed.

Little wonder then that more than a few people are a tad worried that, since no-one knows what’s going to actually take place, it’s entirely possible that the experiment will do something like creating a black hole that will subsequently swallow the Earth into itself.

The scientists at the colider themselves state that this is ludicrous as “there is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be produced by the Large Hadron Collider”, which is frankly a bit rich from a bunch of chaps who are basically trying to demonstrate that one of their main theories doesn’t work properly.

It’s worth getting worried about what might happen when the collider goes online as boffins (a name used by The Sun to describe all those of the ilk of scientists and inventors- a deliberately light-hearted term the newspaper uses to take the sting out of sullying itself with stories of human excellence and achievement) don’t have a partcularly impressive track record with health and safety when they’re on the cusp of great discoveries. John Logie Baird, for example, managed during one of his early experiments in creating television to blow the entire power grid of Glasgow. In a similar vein a chap called Antonio Meucci- who the United States House of Representatives recently passed a motion honouring as the true inventor of the telephone- only came up with his idea after electrocuting his wife and hearing the sound travel down the wire. If this is what happened with two blokes who were only working on transmitting electronic signals across tiny distances, heaven only knows what’ll transpire when those Swiss scientists attempt to recreate the birth of the Universe.

Which is why this is probably a good time to do everything (and, indeed, everyone) that you ever wanted to. Some scientists have postulated that if the hadron collider does create a little black hole of it’s own it won’t engulf the planet instantly, but rather take it’s own sweet time going about it- which means that the whole of humanity will have a clock over it counting down unerringly towards annihilation.

Now if you’re a fan of the movies, particularly the glut of disaster films from the late-90s that featured Earth teetering on the brink of destruction from aliens or an asteroid or something, then you’ll know the drill. We all desperately try to flee the cities and get stuck in traffic or huddle up with our families by the TV and radio awaiting news of whether Will Smith or Bruce Willis has miraculously saved us all with seconds to spare. Then we all cheer, embrace tearfully and listen to a speech by President Morgan Freeman.

I’ve got a feeling that, in real life, this won’t actually happen. Ask yourselves, is that really how you want to spend your final few hours and days on this planet, knowing that the end of everything is just around the corner? For a start off- and let’s not be coy about this- who, knowing that impending armageddon will expunge all awkward consequences, wouldn’t want to give mass, unadulterated fucking-on-the-streets a bash? Just imagine a great big, winner-takes-all, grab-the-nearest-stranger, thronging mass of limbs and fluids rolling merrily up the high street and into oblivion. Like Newcastle on a Friday night. That’s a fitting way to give life a send-off.

Mind you, I did start this piece by stating that everyone should go out and find their special someone before time runs out, and it would take an extraordinary stroke of luck to dive head first (figuratively speaking) into a mass Book of Revelations orgy and happen to catch hold of your one true soulmate. But then again, a bookmaker once set the odds of Earth getting swallowed by a black hole in the next 50 years at 100 million-to-one. So things going horribly wrong in that reactor under the soil of Switzerland could turn out to be the luckiest thing that ever happened to us all and the chances of inadvertantly porking your spiritual muse seem tiny and easily surmountable by comparison. Or, alternatively, you could just play similar odds by buying a lottery ticket.

Either way you’d be getting screwed.