Sex

I’ve never seen a National Treasure whose head I didn’t have a strong urge to shove down the nearest toilet. So when I read that Christopher Biggins had entered the latest Celebrity Big Brother house for a rumoured £150,000 – far, far less than what I was offered, to put it mildly – I fair hugged myself with glee at how cheap they’d got him. I had every reason to dislike him already; many years ago, when I was showing off about what I’d be like if I was a gay man – ‘Rupert Everett, probably, or Oscar Wilde, or Arthur Rimbaud’ – my husband fixed me with a cold glare (for

One moment Trev and I were grooving on the dancefloor, Trev with his head bowed, his eyes closed, and his arms extended like a glider; the next, it seemed, Trev was telling the taxi-driver to drop us off outside an 18th-century townhouse with its front door on the high street. As I got out of the taxi, I fell over for the third time that evening. I’d fallen down on the dancefloor while dancing to ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ by the Chainsmokers. And before going out I’d taken a flyer in the garden at home after contesting a 50–50 ball with my six-year-old grandson, distinctly hearing a crack as my

I walked into the bar and there was Trev standing in front of a giant screen showing Germany v. Italy and chatting up two overawed teenage girls with his usual aplomb and startling frankness. Pleased to see me after all this time, he dismissed them with a kind word and we went to the bar to start drinking. He had voted to leave, he said. Then his cousin Danny came in with Tina, Danny’s latest, with whom he is head-over-heels in love. Danny falling in love with someone has been a big shock to the local community, and it was indeed sad to see him so abjectly enamoured with my

Fluffy bunnies. Human-size, pink and white fluffy bunnies. Twerking. The image has never left me, ever since an ill-fated date to see Purcell’s The Fairy Queen at Glyndebourne in 2012. Over salmon during the damp interval, my date confirmed that he liked the bunnies, I didn’t. Having established myself as a purist and a prude, we parted ways. Since the onslaught of arts cuts, opera-goers have had to harden themselves to scenes of sex and violence – the oldest trick in the book to ramp-up ticket sales. The bunnies hopped on to the stage in the same year that ENO unveiled their notorious Don Giovanni condom ad; two years before,

   New York Even after all these years, I’m still at times floored by the scale of the place. And it’s always the old reliables that stand out: the silvery arcs of the Chrysler Building, the wide avenues, the filigree of Central Park, that limestone monument to power, the Rockefeller Center. Curiously, the recent trend for tall, slender and glassy housing among money-laundering Russians and Chinese does not mix with the city’s motto of ever bigger and grander. It’s as if the transparency of the glass structure is teasing the authorities about the origins of the owners’ wealth. Come in and take a look, we have nothing to hide. Last

Some people seem to want to discuss their sex lives on television, as in the show Sex Box. Couples are interviewed before and after they have tried something new, right there in the studio (although hidden from view). This week, the couple were close friends, and were trying out being lovers for the first time. The interviews are full of therapeutic empowering chat, plus saucy joking. I consider this sort of thing a form of cultural vandalism, rather like what Isis got up to in Palmyra. Something frail and important is being damaged in a quick burst of self-righteousness. What is being damaged is the delicate tradition that associates sex with profound privacy.

Benjamin Franklin thought that an excess of electric fluid gave rise to positive electricity, and a deficiency of the fluid to negative electricity. ‘New flannel, if dry and warm, will draw the electric fluid from non-electrics.’ By an electric he meant substances such as glass, and indeed the air. I’m not sure how much we think of electricity as a fluid today. James Thurber’s mother worried that it would run out of the sockets unless one left a plug in them, but she was perhaps unusual. Flann O’Brien put forward the similar theory that darkness was due to the accretion of ‘black air’. Fluid mediums persisted in our world view because it was hard

I shared a taxi from Cheltenham station to the house party in an outlying village with a stripper. Finding a taxi in Cheltenham during the Festival is as difficult as picking a winner in the Bumper, and we were amazed and pleased to have got one so easily. One wouldn’t have guessed that the dark, petite young woman, thickly wrapped against the cold night air, was a stripper, but she was proud enough of her occupation to talk about it on the seven-furlong ride between the station and the ‘gentleman’s club’ where we dropped her. She’d come all the way from Cardiff, she said, to dance in a cage from

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that, on Britain’s place in the European Union, ‘what I would like to see is a deal in February, then a referendum that would follow’. The pound sank to its lowest against the US dollar since 2010, after Britain’s manufacturing sector shrank unexpectedly by 0.4 per cent in November. BP said it was cutting 4,000 jobs round the world, 600 of them from its North Sea operations. A split in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality ‘would not be a disaster, but it would be a failure’, said the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Revd Justin Welby, as 38 primates met at Canterbury. Trains

In a challenge inspired by the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction award, competitors were invited to submit a libido-dampening ‘love scene’ from a novel. Rhoda Koenig and Auberon Waugh set up the award to shine a spotlight of shame on poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description and poor old Morrissey’s already much-mocked List of the Lost is hotly tipped to scoop this year’s gong. You certainly gave Mozzer a run for his money. John Griffiths-Colby’s entry made me shudder but not in ecstasy — ‘In spite of the bandage having not been changed for the best part of a week, he felt her touch acutely through