It’s Carry On, Boris – a new French farce
IT HAD to happen. The rules and regulations about lockdown and its lightening are becoming more farcical by the day and now the totally inevitable has happened. The powers that have said that couples who do not live together are not allowed to make the beast with two backs. Face it, the whole things has turned into Carry On Coronavirus, or to put it another way, No Sex Please, We’re British. No idea what the French take on this one is but odds are President Macron is not telling his fellow countrymen and women what they can get up to in the still of the night.
Could there be a more uniquely British take on a terrifying pandemic than to reduce it all to the great national embarrassment of talking about sex?We British absolutely love going all bashful about procreation, which is why we are constantly making jokes about it rather than becoming all smouldering and passionate like the more excitable Latin type. We are the country of the saucy seaside postcard and, ironically enough, of the French farce.
And even before this, we had managed to reduce intimate matters to the state of a laughing stock: it seems half the scientific community in the country only takes time off from lecturing us about the importance of staying inside to be caught legging it across the capital in pursuit of a bit of how’s your father, trousers waving at half mast. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turned out that those same scientists had spent a sizeable proportion of their lockdown hiding in wardrobes, quaking with fear as enraged spouses rampaged around the marital home, brandishing bullwhips and vowing retribution. Just remember to keep your distance! Perhaps we are passionate as the Latins, after all.
Oh, and the gift this is going to give to the snoopers. Already hordes of them seem to be sitting behind twitching curtains, noting the exact amount of time that Number 36 had been taking for her daily exercise and she’s no better than she ought to be and no mistake.
Now, when someone purporting to be the gardener goes through the house because he has to get to the garden and then signally fails to emerge on the other side brandishing a lawnmower, it will merit a call to the police. Quite what the police intend to do when made aware that a bit of love in the afternoon may be in progress is debatable. Even if they did burst in to catch the couple in flagrante, they couldn’t actually physically wrestle them apart, while still maintaining social distancing themselves.
No, there’s nothing the British prefer to a good snigger and all the better if it relates to sex. And so finally the Government has given what we really all need: something to cheer us all up.
Should we be surprised? Our Prime Minister, after all, was once the editor of a magazine so renowned for its office entanglements that it earned itself the nickname The Sextator. Carry On Boris and the rest of us as well! as
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SPEAKING of the French, it’s a lovely country, great cheese and wine and of course the region of Champagne.
But the
French can be a teensy tiny bit aggravating in their insistence on being one of the most sophisticated nations on earth.
Now we learn that Catherine Deneuve, one of the most beautiful and stylish people ever, had a decades-long affair with Johnny Halliday who, er, wasn’t. Naff. At least Carla Bruni, right, post numerous rock stars, dabbled with a distinguished publisher before running off with his philosopher son, with whom she had a child, before moving on to then-President Nicolas Sarkozy (do keep up at the back).
At the time she linked up with the French president, she commented, “I’m looking for a man with a nuclear arsenal.” Now that’s what I call stylish. But then again, she is
Italian.