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SCMP Reporter

THE news that eternal damnation is not all fire and little red men carrying pitchforks, but an eternal state of non-being, does little to persuade me that I should go out and find religion.

Eternal non-being does not seem a bad offer, when you consider that the alternative is eternity in heaven, where my aunt Flo is probably urging everyone to make a little less noise while eating their cornflakes, as she did with me when I was a child.

Not that there is a place on offer for me, anyway.

At Christmas Midnight Mass at St Joseph's church this year the closest I could get to the action at the altar was the flyover above Cotton Tree Drive, so busy were the church and its grounds.

The sight of so many people hoping that a quick Hail Mary and How's Yer Father would guarantee them free wings and a halo drove me to the nearest tree to take a leak.

 There is no stopping the flow of cheap champagne, even on consecrated ground.

This one act of bladder liberation alone would seem enough to assure me of permanent non-being status when the time comes, hopefully not too soon.

But to be safe, to make doubly sure that the first face I see when the curtains are drawn is not my aunt Flo's, saying 'Please child! Try and be a little bit quieter with those cornflakes!'  I have to do something really appalling.

So I am reading a book about sex. It was sent to me by a friend in Japan, who obviously thinks I need all the help I can get in that department.

 It is called The Facts Of Life: The Creation Of Sexual Knowledge In Britain, 1650-1950 and, apart from being an excellent tool for clearing seats either side of me on the MTR, it is an academic tome which sets out, in scholarly prose, to assess the impact of the publication of sexual knowledge and advice.

It also contains a number of pleasantly exciting pictures.

 The cover is a rustic scene, part Turner part Thomas Hardy, showing a ruddy-cheeked farm worker and his belle reclining in a meadow, eating apples.

For some reason - and I find no explanation of this in the text - she has a sheep on her lap.

Inside - on page 146, just to save you time should you be fumbling through a copy in the South China Morning Post Family Bookshop - is a remarkable pen and ink illustration of a device, invented by a gentleman called J Laws Milton in 1872, with the purpose of preventing nocturnal emissions.

It is an ingenious contraption, designed to be placed securely over a gentleman's groin and to set off an electrical alarm should anything in that region move in an upward and outwardly direction. Why am I telling you this?  For no reason other than I presumed you might be interested. There will also be many among you who are too embarrassed to go out and buy a book with the word sex in the title.

In Japan, where people buy books only if they have the word sex in the title, my friend had no such problem (Japan is, let us not forget, the country that gave us a supermarket called Condomania, worth the cost of the air ticket to Tokyo alone, just to see the hundreds of giggling girls who fight over prophylactics resembling everything from Concorde to Saddam Hussein, Mrs Thatcher and the Eiffel Tower.

 Japanese men, for reasons that are too deeply embedded in the country's culture to even attempt to understand, leave condom shopping to the womenfolk).

On to page 253 of The Facts Of Life, and the arresting observation that in rural Lincolnshire in the 1890s a survey by Edith Sutton revealed a number of gaps in people's sexual knowledge.

One young woman told how, a day after her wedding, she returned to the local vicar to 'get unwed' because her husband had attempted to do 'something very rude' to her.

Another told how she was perfectly happy with standards of contraception, thank you very much. She had put a piece of sticking plaster over her belly button.

Shall I continue? I thought so.

There was the woman who was admitted to a clinic to give birth to her first baby, but had no idea from where it would emerge.

To you and I, living in an enlightened age, the possibilities seem limited, but this poor young bumpkin was, quite literally, not sure which way to turn.

 The Facts Of Life does not seem to be readily available in Hong Kong.

I have the only copy and will be charging $100 a look. As soon as the editor has finished with it.



Everything that you always wanted to read about sex