Lymph Nodes Book

I've never had internet sex - there must be another word for it, cybersex, obviously, but I'm thinking more along the lines of keyboard sex. All the same, a couple of years ago (and purely as a community service, you understand) I started working on a series of words that could be typed using only the left hand. It was another of those projects that I started and fairly quickly lost interest in.

If this book is about anything I think it would be fair to say that it is about the absurdity of sex. This is the second of Roach's books I've read lately and I must say sex is much funnier than death. This book was laugh out loud funny.

I have also discovered that I have a special face that I wear whenever the words URETHRA and EXPANDED or INSERTED are used in the same sentence. This is especially the case when the word TOOTHBRUSH is also contained in that sentence - but it is not reserved for the collocation of those particular words. In fact, by the end of the book whenever the word URETHRA was used at all I could feel my face responding in a particularly pronounced Pavlovian fashion.

There were so many interesting bits to this book that it is pointless me starting or I simply won't be able to stop. And it was funny and fun - so I am going to recommend it and recommend it highly.

The bit I found most interesting was right at the end, where she was talking about tests that were done in the 1970s that found that the people who enjoyed sex the most were homosexual couples - either gay or lesbian. This was because the heterosexual couples tended to see sex as a destination they needed to reach as quickly as they could, while the homosexual couples played more and teased and delighted in each other more. For some reason we seem to have become sold on the 'sex as performance' metaphor. At one point she said that many women felt sexually inadequate because they believed themselves to be unattractive and spent the whole time worrying about what they looked like - watching themselves in effect. Sex is about being there with someone else, and is better the more 'there' you are - it is a dance, rather than a race or a beauty contest.

Now, this is the second time recently that I've discovered just how incurious I am and have always been. The first time was with Mr Fry's autobiography when he was talking about boys sticking their fingers up their bums. That simply never occurred to me when I was growing up. And to be honest, you could leave me alone in a room for a thousand years and I would never think of having sex with a vacuum cleaner. I am assuming that is not what Billy Bragg means when he has a female character in one of his songs say, "no amount of poetry will mend this broken heart, but you can push the Hoover 'round if you want to make a start".

So, what did I learn? Well, besides that gays make the best lovers, that it is best not to rush into a room when you hear a man calling out "Titan, Titan, Titan" on a video your wife is watching and if God has a place it certainly isn't in the bedroom, I think that the best of this book - like Stiff - is acknowledging that life, death and sex are all a bit absurd and for that we really should be very grateful.