Sensible sex

Well, maybe not prim exactly. But this month's issue looks at what it calls "Soul-less sex."

One night stands, snatched moments in broom cupboards, sex with men you don't know, don't wish to know and couldn't remember their names even if you did. They are not, concludes Cosmo, good for us.

"There is too much peer pressure to go out and get drunk and sleep with people you don't want to without an emotional choice being made," the editor Lorraine Candy told the Sunday Times.

But isn't that pretty much what Cosmo has spent the last 30 years encouraging us to do? Take sex as a pleasure, a bit of casual fun - at about the same level as buying a new lipstick and about as disposable.

And now they're saying, well, maybe no, after all.

Back in the 60s, when the world and Cosmo were still young, we first had the Pill. It really was a liberating experience. The sense of freedom was tangible. It wasn't just sexual freedom - it led to all those women taking control over their lives, planning their children, their careers. If they didn't have it all, they had quite a lot, thank you. Brilliant, liberating stuff.

But now, like so many revolutions, it has gone too far. Instead of happiness and freedom, the sexual revolution has left many young women feeling unsatisfied - in all ways - emotionally fragile and with plummeting self-esteem.

Maybe it is indeed time to bring a little sober celibacy back into our lives. Maybe it's time to make sex special again.

But who would have thought it would be Cosmo telling us this?

Truly, we live in interesting times.

MEANWHILE, the Coronation Street storyline about bigamist Peter Barlow has brought lots of other victims of bigamous husbands out into the open.

Lots of men like married life so much that they want two wives, two homes, two families. You read about such a case at least once a week.

Yet, in all my journalistic years, I can remember only one woman who ever wanted two husbands at a time.

Strange, isn't it?

SOMETIMES an obituary can tell you more than you want to know. Johnny Cash, who died last week, will always be the Man in Black. He was that great combination of a rebel and an honest guy who cared for the underdog. Those Cherokee cheek bones, that gravelly voice, the drink, drugs and powerful cars. And always, but always, that hint of the dangerous. His songs and his voice were redolent of smoky bars, gunfights, jails. Even when he was born again, you felt that he was putting God on the line as much as himself.

Then I read in one of the weekend obituaries that he had a home in Jamaica, where he played golf. Golf? What's more, he wore American-style golfing clothes to do it in.

The Man in Black in check trousers and pastel patterned jumpers?

When I read that, a little bit of my world just crumbled.

THE bigger the wedding, the bigger the anti-climax. Now an expert has come to the same conclusion.

There's apparently a new disorder, known as post-nuptial depression. According to psychotherapist Phillip Hodson, newly weds spend so much time, money, effort and emotional energy on organising their big day, that once it's been and gone, life is a let down.

And as so many couples are already living together, the wedding day isn't even the start of a new life together. Just the start of all the bills coming in for a rather grand and glorious party.

Mr Hodson apparently thinks that weddings are an out of date ritual.

Maybe the answer is to have the smallest, cheapest wedding on offer. Then at least, life can only get better.

SO the country's kitchen cupboards are brimming with unused sandwich toasters, ice cream makers and electric knives, according to a new survey.

I plead guilty to the sandwich toaster.

But that's because the boys love to use it. Late night snacks of cheese and ham toasties leave strings of melted gloop all over the kitchen and burnt black bits on the toaster. It is said to "come to pieces for easy cleaning". Which is true. It's just that once in pieces, it doesn't go back together again.

Our sandwich toaster is not neglected - it's just that I have deliberately hidden it at the back of the cupboard.

Behind the ice-cream maker, in fact.

WELL yes, it's such a breach of trust when disgruntled ex-employees dish the dirt on their bosses. Tut tut. Very reprehensible.

But gosh, the thought of memoirs by Carole Caplin AND Alastair Campbell possibly in the pipeline is just juicy enough to blow those principles out of the window.

Purely in the interests of historical record, of course.

ICE cubes can make you ill. A Government study has shown that nearly half of ice cubes found in clubs and bars contain bacteria that could cause sickness.

See - I told you it wasn't the gin.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk

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