Sunday, April 17, 2011

O please do not kiss

There is a bit of a kerfuffle going on about a couple who were thrown out of a pub for kissing too enthusiastically.

Maybe I just don’t get out enough these days, but it has always struck me that we don’t see very much public kissing & cuddling going on these days, & certainly nothing like what was common in the 1950s & 1960s, when young couples, especially, would canoodle on buses, trains, tubes & & the back rows of cinemas had double seats. In summer parks & beaches were full of couples lying close.

Partly it was because there was a distinct lack of places to go to do it in private, but also perhaps as a guard against getting too carried away.

Billy Graham excoriated the behaviour he observed in Hyde Park, though he apparently saw more than was actually going on.

But then people got cars, the pill became available to all, & old people lost control of young people’s sexual behaviour.

So now, it is the young, or so I once heard in a discussion on Radio 5, who instruct their peers to ‘go get a room’ if they threaten to frighten the horses.