Speculation, Fact and Fiction

No, I haven't dropped off the planet, my sons and I've been spending a week in Ireland with my Dad and his wife. Very nice it was too, including a trip to Dublin Zoo with slovobooks and ephiriel.

My Dad is a great reader, particularly of crime fiction and we got to chatting about the recent obituaries of Mickey Spillane. I particularly liked Spillane's answer when asked how he wrote so fast. 'I want the money.'

Then my Dad reminisced about the penalties for being caught with a Mickey Spillane novel at a Catholic boys' High School in the 1950's. These ranged from endless hours of penance with a rosary to being threatened with outright excommunication. This didn't stop the books being continuously passed around, dog-eared and creased, spines cracked so they automatically fell open at the most salacious passages. The class divided into the boys who only read those bits and those who read the entire thing, cover to cover.

When I was at school in the late 70s and early 80s, the books being similarly circulated were The Godfather and various of Harold Robbins blockbusters. There weren't the penalties attached as this was a UK girls' grammar school but various mothers who saw nothing wrong in delving in their daughters' briefcases were scandalised. By the time my kid sister was at boarding school in the early 90s, Jilly Cooper was the leading choice for vicarious lusting, certainly among the girls.

Did reading this kind of thing do any of us any harm? I don't think so. Not least because, if memory serves, the smutty bits covered a broad gamut of sexual experience, from the (sometimes unfeasibly) pleasurable to the potentially disappointing and even unpleasant/dangerous consequences of going to bed with the wrong person or for the wrong reasons.

Now I'm wondering where today's teens get that kind of perspective, given the availability of online smut. Presumably there's still a place for actual books that can be smuggled around in school bags when web-surfing can be foiled by internet security software and can be betrayed by browser caches.

Anyway, time to go and address domestic stuff as the next two weeks will see a variety of visits to other family and friends. Expect regular service to resume in early September.