Читать книгу The Men Commandments - Christian O’Connell - Страница 14

It’s also at school that our young man minds first get filled with the low background chatter of sex. A lot. As little boys our willies are things of fascination, and they remain that for the rest of our lives. With puberty, the fascination becomes an obsession. Most men grow out of this – unless you’re an MP or a professional footballer.

Its size, measuring it, playing with it. Our lives revolve around our own special friend. I remember an assembly which was all about sexual reproduction. The girls were told all about the changes they would be going through, and us boys got cheap thrills at the slides of breasts in bras. Then the woodwork teacher walked out and started telling us, and I’m not making this up, how to correctly measure your penis. The woodwork teacher. He said, as only a man could, that looking down at your penis was an inaccurate way to determine its length due to depth perception. A tape measure was best. I was now trying to work out how I was going to smuggle my mum’s tape measure out of her sewing kit.

‘What do you need that for, darling?’

‘Just going to measure my cock.’

‘OK, don’t forget your tea’s almost ready.’

My journey into self-pleasure coincided with something that I now look back on as some kind of cruel trick played by my parents. They had done my bedroom out and pretty damn cool it looked too. The problem was my bed sheets. They were black.

Well, black with what resembled snail trails everywhere. I remember my mum’s look of surprise as I started to do my own washing – but just the bed sheet. I almost had to get help to break it in half to get it in the washing machine. The evidence, trail of evidence, was there for all to see, and it prompted my mum to say ominously, ‘Your dad’s going to have a chat with you about all that.’ Yes, it was time to have the birds and bees chat. Oh God.

It was a very brief chat, short on detail and anything of any use. Just a ‘You know about it all, do you?’ and that I was to use a condom. Which I was already. For making water bombs. Did they have any other use?

Thankfully, one of the kids at my school had the business acumen of a young Sir Alan Sugar and had started selling pornographic magazines. Where he got them from we never knew. If you were really lucky, though, you would find a free one in a hedge. You don’t seem to see this so much any more. I often wondered how this started. Was it someone’s remote storage place? Were they hidden there by the publishers, trying to get us hooked? No one knows. These days hedges have been replaced by the internet.

I did eventually have to buy one (the hedge supply had dried up) and I have to be honest and say it actually scared me. The nudity and images were too much too soon for me and I disposed of it in the neighbour’s hedge. A lovely old man lived there with his wife, and he did have a heart attack shortly after my hedge gift. Was my copy of Razzle (with its ‘3 Bum Special’ feature) to blame in any way?

Things went into hormonal overdrive every Friday night with a new TV series called Dempsey and Makepeace. Move aside The A Team and The Rockford Files, Glynis Barber has arrived! By now I had a TV in my room and I would say good night to my parents a full ten minutes before it started – much to their surprise. What kid when finally allowed to stay up late goes to bed early?

Saying I was tired and needed to go to bed, I would leg it upstairs to get ready. I needn’t go any further other than to say that the TV needed a good wipe down on a Saturday morning. Those snails had been on the move again…