How do you feel about public displays of affection? Let's call them PDAs for ease of use and because I like pointless abbreviations that make me sound like a smug businessman. Anyway, PDAs divide the human race. One person's affectionate pat is another's lascivious fondle. Some people would rather die than French kiss on the metro. Others consider anything more than one-third dressed perfectly respectable.
I'm quite English about it, repressed and reserved, and alarmed by any public displays of anything other than quiet indifference. In my book, anything more adventurous than holding hands is just an invitation to voyeurism. But maybe there's something wrong with me. Is it sad that, given the choice of bearing witness to a lip-locked, mooning pair of love birds and a couple screaming and threatening castration, I'm more comfortable around the latter?
Well, I haven't a choice in the matter. With spring and summer on the way, hormones are going to start cranking up to a high pitch and PDAs, like bad Bermuda shorts, will be everywhere you look. It has already started in soap land. A friend reported that some recent frisky behaviour from Ken and Dierdre in Corrie put her right off her Walnut Whip. It seems even fictional PDAs have the ability to distress.
It's not like such expressions of fondness haven't always been with us. Why else did there used to be those 'No Petting' signs in the swimming baths (equipped with a cartoon couple just in case you thought they meant don't bring your Yorshire Terrier)? Were times really so grim for the previous generation that chlorine and the odd floating plaster were an enormous aphrodisiac?
The thing is we are used to watching teenagers slobber all over each other. It's fair enough. It's a teenager's duty to naff off the general public and, anyway, love is as blind and stupid to the disapproving looks of passers by as it is to the fact that gold sovereign rings and tattooed knuckles are deeply unattractive qualities. Particularly in a 14-year-old girl.
But my friend's alarm at Ken and Deirdre's canoodling raises a question (and not just is Deirdre slowly turning into an owl?). Should we be nauseated by people of the older generation expressing their affection?
I've mixed feelings on the subject. While I'd rather not watch two old dears hoovering out each other's dentures while I'm trying to read the paper in the morning, I would be rather impressed to see evidence that, after more than 40 years together, a couple could manage to exchange civil words, let alone bodily fluids.
Yet I never see any older people snogging or gazing lovingly into each others' eyes on the train. I only ever see them picking lint off lapels or nagging about who left the gas on. Maybe they save it until they go swimming?
How about some encouragement for a new kind of PDA - Pensioner Displays of Affection? But let's be clear there - a chuck under the chin or a pat of the bobble hat is quite sufficient to convince me that affection can last the distance. One glimpse of a support stocking and I'm pulling the emergency cord.
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