Girls Girls Girls… Sailor intoned in 1975, dressed rather self-consciously and perhaps over-literally in their sailor suits. Get up and meet those pretty Girls, Girls, Girls; Step on, the world keeps swinging; Put on the dazzling charm; Get up and find those pretty girls. Yeah, back in 1975. I’ve just been on holiday on a beach with my wife and 10 of her friends, who are single women, aged from 34 to 53, just a few years either side of my own age. For a single day back in the 90s I stood in for a friend as an artists model, and I realised then how much one thinks about it without ever wanting to; standing in Grecian poses trying oh so hard to think instead about income tax returns, Geoffrey Boycott, etc, while the budding Lucian Freuds and Tracey Bloody Emins smirked as they fancifully charcoaled in my pathetically quivering loins. But I’m happy to say that I have returned from my summer sojourn with my conscience intact. Sometimes being old makes things a little easier.
I'm too young to remember "Girls Girls Girls" by sailor, but I do remember "Boys Boys Boys" by Italian temptress Sabrina (80s) - her luscious Latin loveliness one of the more pathetic reasons why I decided to read Italian at university, only to find it wasn't anything like the brochure.
ReplyDeleteOne of the worst things about being a bloke is feeling attraction towards anything suitably shaped. Sometimes I wish I were a Lhasa Apso and it were all just short bursts of instinctive programming.
Gentlemen, please. Once again, I have stumbled across something unsavoury, as the elephant keeper said. I turn my back for five minutes, and all manner of roguery is unleashed. Can you not take the matter into your own hands? Self control should be your prop and stay.
ReplyDeleteAnd Major! Well, really. "Anything suitably shaped" could include Mr Pete Burns, Dame Barbara Windsor or anything injected with poly-acrylamide.
You are both too young to remember the celebrated court case of the 1970s McKinney v Anderson, in which the jury was asked to examine a male chastity garment owned by the Mormon plaintiff. Perhaps they are still available mail order. I suggest you investigate. Cordially as ever, etc
Coincidentally, MC, I almost became a sailor after hearing "Girls Girls Girls", thinking it would be lasses in every port and dandyish uniforms, rather than the endless staring at water and sodomy that it surely is.
ReplyDeleteRegrettably I am old enough to remember Joyce McKinney, Mrs Pouncer - didn't even need to Google her, so fresh is her memory!
I was thinking about how you were tricked in studying Italian, MC. I suppose it doesn't get you free sabaticals in the steamier and hornier places of the globe - which always seemed the reason why people learned Spanish at university. But Italy's not such a bad place. Could've been worse: you could've been seduced into learning Mongolian by hearing Qtshkjgrwkklgfrq singing her smash hit Yaks Yaks Yaks.
ReplyDeleteWith me it was the other way round - if I am being brutally honest, one of the factors in my deep and pure-hearted interest in Indonesian culture was the fact that on my first and somewhat unplanned visit (it was one leg of a concert tour I was on), I stumbled across a rich supply of giggling young ladies who - unlike their Western counterparts - thought I was good-looking.
ReplyDeleteAfter such a revelation, one would if necessary nail one's nads to the outside of a jumbo jet to get back there, were one male. Which one is. Go figure...
I studied Russian because it made me sound significant and intense to first-year gals from the dumber counties.
ReplyDeleteIt also meant two years in the Glorious Soviet Union back in the days when it was still a penitentiary for obliging young women.
Best of all, it got me a low-fi job for what looks like life.
Ha ha, skru U German Literature loozazz!
Gyppo has a charming story here, and nailing one's nads to the outside of an airplane must be the surest manifestation of true love. But he also makes a more important point: the great men of history never receive the (sexual) honour they deserve in their own land. Look at Jimi Hendrix: just another coloured boy when he was in the US, but a Sex God when he arrives in London, with Europe's fairest ladies queueing outside his bedroom door.
ReplyDeleteThe Glorious Soviet Union does sound like a fun place to have been. Foreign students etc arriving in the Glorious Peoples Republic of Romania were disappointed to find a place where both contraception and abortion had been banned by the cuddly family-orientated Ceauşescus, making the ladies less obliging than most.
One of our Russian teachers was detained for unspecified reasons on a school trip back when the KGB required no specific reason for that sort of thing. The rumours passed on by other teachers involved a Muscovite youth and a wooden spoon and we all carefully pretended not to understand any of the innuendo.
ReplyDeleteI admire your holiday courage. Having spent nearly all my working life in mostly-female environments I've no illusions as to their behaviour under vino.
Welcome Mr Musgrove! The Muscovite youth/wooden spoon innuendo would be enough to make any teacher's life unlivable from that moment on - he'd have been better off staying with the KGB.
ReplyDeleteI'v tried to leave posts on your neorealist librarianship blog Tales from Helminthdale, but have not been allowed to save any of them yet - something technical is wrong.
Apologies dear chap. I've got moderation switched on (nasty library habit)
ReplyDelete