Tag: Nostalgia in waves Volume three

The Joy of Sex Education

There were only two times I remember there being sex education at our school. The first time was in biology class. My biology teacher looked like a cross between Magnus Pyke and Dr Snuggles. He was a decent man and a competent teacher. Normally we talked about animals or plants or we dissected frogs but this day was different.

For reasons I don’t quite understand, to this day, our biology teacher decided to forgo our usual lesson on things like photosynthesis and osmosis and decided to talk about how humans procreate, from start to finish with all the icky bits. Perhaps someone in charge of the cirriculum had decided we knew nothing about sex and needed teaching. We were eleven, so most of us knew something about sex in varying degrees. Maybe he decided to talk about this off his own bat. Was it improvised? Had he been up all night rehearsing? Was this the one lesson in the year he had been dreading for months, or looking forward to?

No. He hadn’t been looking forward to it at all. That fact showed in his whole demeanour. I’ve never seen a man get through a talk with such obvious awkwardness. During some moments, he looked like he was in physical pain.

The lesson stands out for two reasons, the strained seriousness and extreme effort of Pyke Snuggles to convey the basic biological processes of procreation and the doubled over please stop making us laugh, it really hurts now, no seriously, please stop sir, but he wouldn’t. We were not emotionally mature enough for this talk, not in a class setting. I like to think I was. For the first fifteen minutes, I sat there very composed and attentive and straight faced. After a while though, I was as bad ad the rest of them, who were practically rolling around on the floor clutching the stomachs.

It began with embarrassed sniggers but just got worse. Laughter and perhaps embarrassment is contagious. If he only knew, we were in pain too, trying to stifle our laughter but as with all these things, the more you try to stop doing something, the more you sometimes can’t stop doing it. Eventually, we gave in and let it all out. We drowned out his voice with our laughter. Perhaps that was deliberate.

I felt a combination of sympathy and distress for Pyke Snuggles. On one hand, I was sensitive to his extreme discomfort and frequent red face. On the other, I wanted him to continue, as this was the most fun I’d had in years. Even Fawlty Towers didn’t make me laugh this much. It was very conflicting. It was also painful to laugh so much.

At one point, he got cross with us and started shouting. This just made us laugh even more. It was at that point in mirth evolvement when everything he said and everything he did made us explode. We were far too over stimulated to back down now. It was like he was suddenly the best stand up comedian in the world and we’d paid good money to be entertained.

He gave up and we ended class early. As Pyke Snuggles exhausted stooped frame exited the classroom, I couldn’t help thinking he was going for a much earned lie down with a couple of Valium.

The Joy of Moist

Apparently, some people don’t like the word moist. I think damp is a worse word with more negative connotations, conjuring images of ruined blackened walls, fungus, mould and spores that lead to ill health, suffering and eventual death.

I don’t know why some people don’t like the word moist. Maybe they connect it to the word sweaty, or areas of the body that may be overheated, but even in that case, moist is better than drenched or wet or sweaty, smelly, sticky or stinky. I don’t particularly like the word sweaty but I think all words are good. They all describe. Sweaty is descriptive, it’s powerful, it’s evocative but why would it be preferable to moist? Sweaty cake or moist cake? Sweaty soil or moist soil? There’s no competition. Moist is not too wet, it’s not too dry, it’s the goldilocks of H20.

I’m at a loss to understand what is so bad about the word moist. It even sounds good phonetically. A soft velvety sound, relativelty easy to spell, looks good, sounds good.

In the seventies and eighties, when I was growing up, the word moist didn’t seem to be a problem. I discovered that a lot of women shudder at the word moist. I don’t understand why that is. There are many other words that would make you shudder. What I learned lately is the amount of men who don’t like it either. If people can’t bring themselves to like the word, perhaps they could appreciate the positive connotations of it in some circumstances. Moistness can be a help and not a hindrance and in this world where things are either too wet or too dry, it can be a boon to life.

When I think of moist, I think of moist soil. A plant with moist soil is a plant that has watered soil which will make a very happy plant that will thrive and grow. Also, when I think of the word moist, I think of moist cake. There’s nothing more delicious than a moist cake. There’s nothing worse than a dry cake that should be moist, yet no-one falls over into a dead faint at the word dry. Dry cake, skin, or soil, does not have so much of a future as moist cake, skin or soil. So as far as I’m concerned, moist is a great word.