small town boy...

Tonight I have dug out my collection of CDs from ‘back in the day’ and am listening to Bronski Beat cos that’s how I roll, plus I have been thoroughly obsessed all week with ‘Brokeback Mountain’ which I put down to the simultaneous delivery of ‘Of Mice and Men’ to two year groups . There are parallels – honest.

Naturally enough this got me a-ponderin’ and a –ruminatin’.  In my four plus decades I have been about a bit what with one thing and another  - usually escaping from the scene of some kind of horrible misunderstanding as you might imagine, but on my travels I have garnered many a truism about life, so much so, that were I a gentlemen I would probably feel the need right now to grow a massive legitimate beard and write a novel like ‘Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance’. Fortunately I am not a geezer, so no undergraduate will ever be forced to perplex themselves at the foot of my moribund yearnings.

Suffice to say, that one of the truisms I have been forced to accept is this; If you go to a small community, there will always be a man in it who disturbs ordinarily quite sanguine women-folk. He will be inordinately and contextually speaking outrageously pretty. He will be in a position where the normal traffic of existence will make it hard to avoid him. Due to the nature of all other reverse Darwinism males in the vicinity he will take on a level of import that is truly Zeus like. And perhaps most significant of all, while he may well be aware of this, he will not use  this knowledge to his loiny advantage.

We have such a specimen hither and there is nary a woman between the age of 9 and 90 who doesn’t get a far away look in her eyes, giggle when he speaks to her or mutters to her mates what revolting things she would do to him given 20 minutes alone etc ad inf. I cannot help thinking this must be a terrible burden to the poor lad, but he looks quite well on it all things being equal.

Friday night is family night at The Narrows, which is a wonderful opportunity for grown ups to get thoroughly munted while their offspring run about like dervishes wielding pool cues about their heads. Yet by the 6^th dubious Chilean cocktail you can bet your wages the women will drop all pretence and start tarting with the help. It’s not our fault – he will insist on vaulting over the bar in athletic manly fashion, his lean tanned form displaying every rippling muscle adorned with high class tattage. The heir went googly eyed tonight muttering ‘Look at the pretty pictures on his arms’. We women exchanged a glance and discussed when might be an opportune time to deliver the ‘Talk’ to my 9 year old daughter.

But  not for long, because then he was supplicating his Chippendale taut ass before us to hand over cutlery. We all cleared our throats, breathed deeply and maintained our outwardly cool exteriors. Next he sidled up with a twinkling eye and a bottle of ketchup.

‘Sauce?’ he enquired his Latin dark eyes flashing with surpressed, barely, libidinously high sperm count. We couldn’t help ourselves. We giggled. Horrible.

I thought I’d escaped all this nonsense when the English department had an impromptu development meeting on the smoking deck, but OH no. Out comes the Falklands answer to Enrique proffering his massive zippo flame and interesting Spanish inflection. The normally highly ebullient pair immediately fell to taciturn sheepishness.

‘You know,’ say he ‘Deborah in Spanish has another meaning.

Sensibly, I kept quiet. I know, I’ve been had this way before. M’colleague though, being an excitable hard core metal bitch up for life’s experience said;

‘What’s that then?’

He violently mimed eating a kebab. Sounds horrible I know but both The English department had to hold each other vertical to forgo lust-inspired fainting.

‘Deborah me. It means eat me. You know, with real hunger’.

The junior member of the department fell into a sort of catatonic reverie. The silence needed to be broken. I swallowed down the five litres of drool and lisped with great difficulty,

‘So it may be taken as an insult or an erotic come-on?’

The Latin Love-a-rama raised his beautiful head and exhaled fragrant smoke into the brilliantly star covered heavens. Behind him a pub full of women sighed audibly. I kicked m’colleague visciously while he was not paying attention. She snorted and came back to herself with an irritated burst of profanity.

‘exxxxxxaaaaaactly’ he breathed, before smiling a smile that would encourage a nun to sell her soul to Bapometh and wandered back inside.

‘Bugger me!’ said m’colleague, ‘it’s illegal innit? I wouldn’t mind half an hour on that!’

‘Hmmmm….’ I replied unconvinced.

The whole thing reminded me of when I took the ladies of year 11 on a trip to that London and we inadvertently ran into the pretty half of ‘One Direction’ in an off licence. The ancients write about the horror of unbridled female sexuality quite effectively and I have witnessed it in the raw when a young lady who never failed to submit her homework  on time fell to her knees keening like an eighteenth century Latvian peasant and licking a minor pop celebrity. If you’ve seen that sort of thing, you never really recover. The mind is set on a different axis and will never see the world as quite right again.

Fortunately I have never been devastatingly attractive to the opposite sex apart from about 3 months when I was 22. And in fairness I don’t think that was me per se but a combination of Rigby and Pellar and a fishnet body stocking. I can honestly say that this is has never been a cause for distress. I have had some truly gorgeous friends and had the pleasure of having my dance card filled, if you will  by some seriously hot trouser and I always thought they carried an additional burden.

It is quite clear that if the purveyor of sauce had a phD in quantum relatively, the only impact this would have on women would be to make their ovaries rattle even louder when he walked past as clearly this would make him even more of a stud-muffin.

To be lusted after by half the populace must be awfully tiring and must seem particularly ironic if you have recurrent gout or trapped wind. The truly pretty have their human fallibility ripped from them like the thin cotton dress of a 70s porn queen. I for one thank the Lord for my intrinsic ability to be not sexy, however hard I try. The thought of having the science department all a quiver when I walk past would be truly terrifying….

Borah out