The punctuation apart, how can she confess to being so ghastly - let alone to being proud of it! I would travel a million miles to get away from a person like that. Displays of lechery at the office Christmas party are much more acceptable than her kind of behaviour. They are at least honest and straightforward, and therefore much easier to deal with.

The Guardian, December 14, 1996

They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality: this is English consistency... In England, in response to every emancipation from theology one has to reassert one’s position in a fear-inspiring manner as a moral fanatic.

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 5

It is for this reason [sexual segregation] we can neither accept a compliment nor reject a pass, or at least not with the slightest grace. Also for this reason the pleasure of doing trivial things with the opposite sex, like hanging out or having lunch or shopping, is denied to us for ever. When Englishmen and women meet, it is always with an air of purpose - for work or courtship, by prior, formal arrangement.

Vogue, January 1997, p.89

This is the only country in Europe where young men think if they don’t drink eight pints on Friday night people will call them a poof.

The Guardian, December 28, 1996 (The year in review by Catherine Bennett)

The rolling English drunkard made the rolling
English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round
the shire.

G. K. Chesterton, The Rolling English Road.

I shall attempt to guide the novice through the labyrinth of the native sexuality. And, specifically, about the sexuality characterising the male of the species and more aptly pertaining to the sphere of pre-coital approach generally known by the term flirting. It should be noted that these conclusions have been reached after painstaking zoological observation in various contexts in which the mating game is permitted. In most cases, my observations found a fertile ground in venues like pubs and clubs. Let me make a fine distinction at this point, and introduce some special terminology, as the inexperienced at the workings of the species might have some unanswered questions.

Pubs is the general term applied to the natural habitat in which the great majority of the species exercises their social rituals regardless of age (anybody over eighteen), sex, social class, beliefs, etc. As a university guide for Incoming Erasmus Students says: ‘A good deal of English social life, especially for the young and unattached, centres on the pub’.

Clubs is a more exclusive habitat in which mating patterns of the young and unattached achieve a higher level of intensity. However, in both these venues, the consumption of yeast extract is a must. It is the social ritual par excellence. Not just that, but it would be considered an insult to the male’s virility to consume quantities of yeast extract in less than a pint. Pint is another culture-specific term which refers to the glass container of yeast extract, commonly known as beer in other species. So, if a native suggests that you should go for a pint he means to go for a beer.

A male would not dream of manifesting or expressing in any way whatsoever familiarity or interaction with the female of the species had he not beforehand consumed a minimum of five pints. Of course, this depends on the individual’s idiosyncrasy and physical stamina. And indeed, a resistance to this substance is considered to be the sine qua non of manhood to such extend that women are known to divorce men who have repeatedly proved to have a tolerance below five pints. (I’ve actually heard it in a pub: ‘No, I wouldn’t go with a man who cannot take his pints’!).

To recapitulate, the possibility of expressing sexual behaviour begins with the landmark of the fifth pint. At this point the male becomes irritated, disquieted, frustrated, myopic as a miraculous metamorphosis takes place. And indeed, this far exceeds any other phenomenon in the natural universe, far beyond the metamorphosis of a larva into a butterfly. What happens then?

Well, the individual animal, from his prior state of a priori penislessness metamorphoses into a huge, wobbling, pulsating phallus, preparing a massively imminent explosion of penis extract. In such a state, the myopic animal will seize upon anything that moves and remotely resembles a female of the species. If he is lucky enough, the female will condescend and the flirting ritual will begin. During this time, of course, the consumption of liquid yeast extract would have continued, culminating to a total of seven, eight, or even, nine pints. At such a state the male will follow the female at her nest in order for the procreation ritual to take place. But, as it so happens with most of these cases, and due to an excessive consumption of yeast extract, the huge, wobbling, pulsating phallus will al-chemically re-metamorphose into a tiny little piece of shit that would remain undetectable even under the scientific scrutiny of the world’s most powerful microscope.

Funnily enough posteriori penislessness (after the small ‘penisfulness’ interval inbetween) at the end of a long night’s ‘entertainment’ goes hand-in-hand with pennylessness which, to a certain degree, explains the financial shortcomings of students.

                                                 *

“So what is the true English sexual vice?” I asked.
Julien became pompous, “Cuckoldry.”
“Not alcohol?” I asked sweetly.

Maria Alvarez, Smack Habits, GQ, December 1996, p100

Native promiscuity (and native drunken debauchery) is the inevitable outcome of a censored, and consequently abstemious, attitude towards the art of flirting, ultimately linked to the general impoverished view towards all things amorous. In other words, having been deprived of the possibility of playing the sweet game of flirtation as well as freely savouring the excitement of passionate emotional states, they attempt to compensate for that by means of improving the quantity rather than deepening the quality.

Inebriation is not an event that occurs with the intention of jouissance, transcendence, creativity, overflow of emotion, but rather a habitual return to an oblivious state of mind. In other words, it is not romantic inebriation in the vein of Keats (“Oh give me women, wine and snuff/ ’Till I cry out ‘Hold, enough!’”) or Baudelaire (‘get drunk... with wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose!’) but the vomit of a sub-urban mouse drunk on the rather less exalted vintage found in sewers (actually, the best lager I tasted in England was Czechoslovakian: Tatran).

And have you ever seen a mouse drunk on amour, virtu or poesie?

                                                 *

Sex is something that usually takes place in the heart of the ‘dark hours’ (late at night and early in the morning), preferably under the non compos mentis excuse of being ‘drunk and disorderly’. Deviation from this pattern, either in the form of male exhortations towards a day-time intercourse or as a non-pissed-out-of-your-head approach, signify outright lechery and are often thought to be the behavioural traits of culturally underpriveleged individuals and foreigners.

                                                 *

I shall recount an event that took place whilst I was researching the one-night-stand phenomenon. I had been to the legendary Cavern, in Scouseland, the club where the Beatles used to play. I noticed one lady that was sat with somebody of the same sex but rather older -she seemed old enough to be her mother or aunt. As the evening unfolded and the flirtation increased in the shape of innuendo-imbued half-clandestine glances, we finally found each other dancing together and chatting. At the end of the night I suggested that we went somewhere together to which she was reluctant as she had to return to the hotel as she was staying with her aunt. She said ‘it would be nice to shag your brains out but honestly there is no way I could make it tonight, you see my aunt wouldn’t let me’.

Upon hearing that, an image was automatically visualized in my mind whose morbidity was fit for a spooky thriller making me reach the verge of nausea. I would rather keep my brains in my skull during sex if you don’t mind, please, I thought, as I imagined my brains escaping my head and joining her astral brains somewhere above our bodies in the midst of sexual intercourse. I was so terrified with that image that I sworn to abandon conducting fieldwork in identified public sex environments, But how can you shag your brains out?, I managed to murmur in consternation, only to recover from the shock a few years later when my grasp of idiomatic English had improved.

                                                 *

Recreational drinking sometimes results directly from squalor, overwork and underpay, but sometimes also from the possession of funds without an accompanying tradition which ensures their constructive application.

Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, p. 393

In other words, their ‘hedonistic’ excesses are desperate reactions to the dynasty of a deeply ingrained and culturally procured anaphia (inability to touch) anhedonia (inability to experience pleasure) and aphilokalia (inability to experience beauty) - alexithymia comes as a natural corollary of all these. Indeed, their hedinistic excesses stand for the death throes of unlived pleasured, the false simulacra of convivialtity (only to disintegrate with the ‘mo[u]rning after’), accompanying that funeral procession

which they euphemistically call:

l i f e.

© Copyright by Spiros Doikas

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