with Jill Campbell Mackay
Testy Testosterone
I HAVE now reached that ‘certain’ age when at long last my number of brain cells is a more manageable size and I now find I can live without sex (but, alas, not without my reading glasses).
This combination of ‘age’ and ‘sage’ allows me to turn the spotlight on one of life’s great conundrums — why some men turn their lives inside out, dump a long-term partner and take up with another woman.
The fact is that men who do jump ship (or entire fleets) do so not in order to dramatically change their world: apparently all they really want to do is ‘complete’ it.
In other words men have always wanted to have it all. They do indeed swing both ways, wanting both a lover and a wife, but they also lustily crave latex thongs, French knickers and carpet slippers.
Men have always been caught between a deep desire to settle down and the equally deep and pressing need to put it around a bit. They have the urge to plant their seed firmly in as many different places at the same time as they plant banks of roses in the back garden. Honest men will admit they do indeed want both — the excitement of being unattached along with the security of being in a relationship; they want the romance and the thrill of the chase, along with the warm cosy feelings that come when the foray is finally over. They are torn between domesticity and promiscuity, pulled in opposite directions by the happy home and the knocking shop. Men, unlike women, never talk about ‘having it all’. They do not concern themselves with the fragile balancing act between work and family, about deciding to stay late at the office or go home and read the kids a bedtime story, about choosing to skimp on parenting or their professional life, all the difficult choices that women have to make.
It’s more fundamental than that: we are not talking about having it all, we are talking about ‘having it both’ — passion and security, excitement and shelter.
Men walk out on loyal wives, abandon children, and wreck the marital home because men have always dreamed of having it both. Even when settled down with everything they have ever dreamed of, including a woman who can whip up a home-made steak and kidney pie while wearing a black lace teddy, there is always the other option, that naughty thought pattern lurking at the back of the potting shed — “what I am going to do with all this seed?”
The wounds inflicted in relationships are invariably caused by men who want to have it both! They want the kind of sex they won’t have forgotten by the next day, but they also crave a sense of stability. They want a woman who not only haunts their dreams but they also want a partner they can talk to. They want their pulse to race and their blood pressure to drop — all at the same time. For many it’s dreaming the impossible dream, but that doesn’t stop all men at some time or another wishing it could become reality.
It is never the act of infidelity that a man regrets, only the discovery of the act.
Men know that it is quite possible to have meaningless sex with someone while being in love with their partner, because they have one overdeveloped organ — their ears, and when the vibrant ‘call of the wild’ happens they often answer it.
They will always seem to be caught between the little house on the prairie and the bordello, until they resolve their inner conflict and decide once and for all between what they want and what they need — or be condemned to a lifetime of serious relationships that come around as regularly as the Olympics.
Perhaps men should stop thinking that romance is only something they can find away from home. Maybe they should make more effort to tailor their dreams to more manageable proportions if they are ever going to find lasting happiness. One doesn’t have to be old to know that always trying to ‘have it both’ means that in the end you don’t end up with everything, you end up with nothing.
But hey, what do I know? Nowadays my idea of a little action is adding some extra fibre to my diet.
Eye of the storm
YET ANOTHER wacky game show concept from Japan, that hotbed of human humiliation.
The Niramekko Obsha festival has been an annual event for several centuries, held at the Komagata Shrine in Chiba.
The word ‘Niramekko’ literally means ‘to stare someone down’ and the competition rules are simple – once gazing has started you must not look away or giggle but keep up a constant unfluttering eye contact a for long periods of time.
To further stress out the ogling twosomes jeering supporters are encouraged to make the opponents crack by shouting out the odd funny story or lewd joke. Those who waver wander and blink are then deemed to have lost and as a punishment they have to slink off and drink large quantities of sake.
The origin of this festival was as a predictor of the weather and its effect on the year’s harvest, although I’m still trying to work out the connection between men being forced to sit cross-legged in front of each other, eyeball to eyeball and half naked, as a proven method of valid meteorology.
Needless to say the TV companies are currently developing a game-show based around the Niramekko Obsha festival. If they follow their usual form there will once again be heavy emphasis on base humiliation and unnatural feats of endurance as teams of noble citizens labour under serious odds in an attempt to break their opponents’ concentration. No doubt to help them along there will be the usual liberal dose of flat white worms, the contents of cat litter boxes, squishy bananas, bald chickens, small goats, a stand-up comedienne, rubber bands, and a bucket of tapioca (to say nothing of water hoses, firecrackers and small climbing furry marsupials).
New wee word
McSLAVEN (noun) This word is used to describe the disposition of a black bin-bag once it has been filled and placed on the ground. A McSlaven then results as the bag in question invariably keels to one side, never staying in the upright position.
Sole music
THOSE damn clever scientists have been at it again. OK, there is still no cure for cancer but teams of pointy heads at the Rowland Institute for Science in Massachusetts have over the past four years been busy trying to prove that fish have a memory and can identify different types of music.
CDs played to their piscatorial audience included Schubert’s trout Quintet, and Paganini’s Variations, and guess what? They claim that sure enough a cod or a haddock can indeed appreciate tunes in a way comparable to humans; they recognise tunes, melodic patterns and can “classify music by artistic genre”.
It took them four years to come up with a fact so obvious that we ordinary folk clocked to it years ago. Fish do, after all, have an all-over scale system that must make them jolly receptive to a touch of Verdi.
