BARRIE HUDSON: Prostitute guide is the real McCoys

It’s a sort of trade directory for discerning deviants to consult before choosing a prostitute.

As the book is freely available, I thought I’d put together a little guide to users of adult services in South West England Plus South Wales.

It might come in handy if you’re unfortunate enough to live near one of the people whose services are advertised in Mr McCoy’s guide, and you need to know the correct terminology before you complain to the police or the council.

The main categories of user include:

• Snivelling inadequates. Paralysed by morbid terror at the thought of interacting with the opposite gender on anything like equal terms, doing so as part of a financial transaction makes them feel powerful. Surprisingly, relatively few such creatures make it as far as using adult services at all. They used to do it more often, especially if they were too cowardly to buy a mucky magazine from the paper shop, but the internet means they now seldom have to leave their rooms, unless it’s to take Mum to the supermarket, have their spectacles upgraded or something like that.
• Men who read those cynical online guides to chatting up women but discover that the techniques don’t seem to work. They assume this is because women are cold and heartless creatures, but in fact it’s because they can spot a weirdo a mile off. The mad, staring eyes and drooling tend to be a bit of a giveaway.
• Men with personal hygiene issues. If you smell like onions being roasted on a pyre of old tyres and deceased pigs, parts of you have moss growing on them and you’ve been banned from the municipal swimming pool because you keep leaving a ring around it, most people wouldn’t be intimate with you if you paid them. Some people would, however, which is why anybody who says those who go into the sex trade aren’t desperate is on shaky ground.
• The unspeakably boring. Creators of guides to adult services tend to portray themselves as sophisticated and debonair men-about-town, and so do the users of those guides, but one can’t help suspecting that many have the conversational aptitude of a dead dog. It’s wrong to judge people on appearances, of course, but they all look as if they sound like John Major, and corner people at parties to talk about the ideal valve pressure on an Austin Montego.
• Irremediable pervoids. Often the product of the public school system, their early experiences involving flogging, cold baths and custard have left them with some highly unusual tastes. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, of course; each to their own, even if the kit they bring on a romantic weekend happens to look like it was nicked from a builder’s Transit. It’d be nice if everybody involved was a willing participant, though, instead of at least one person only doing it because the alternative is the breadline.
• Politicians. See ‘irremediable pervoids’ above. Suggest that the best way of rescuing prostitutes from the horror, danger and degradation is to target and shame the men who use them, and you’ll be told such a move would be unworkable. It wouldn’t be unworkable at all; it would be very workable indeed, and that’s why it’ll never happen. The last thing certain people at Westminster want us to know about is what they get up to with budgies, satsumas, tins of pork luncheon meat, stuffed armadilloes and rolled up copies of National Geographic.
• Judges. See ‘politicians’ above.

A little of what you fancy...

DR William McCrea, an eminently sensible Great Western cardiologist, has proved something many have long suspected: that a couple of glasses of red wine a day reduce the risk of heart attacks.

I’ll remember that the next time somebody calls me an old drunk.

“It’s good for me,” I’ll say. “The heart doctor said so.”

With a bit of luck, nobody will point out that the heart doctor actually recommends only a couple of 125ml glasses rather than a quart jug.

With even more luck, they won’t point out that the heart doctor specifies red wine and not, say, supermarket own-brand spirits or a variety of cider popular among tramps.

Take a tip on tipping...

FLY-tipped green waste will be left in the streets, we learned last week.

It seems the introduction of a £40 annual charge for green waste collection has led to a surge in cases, exactly as many people predicted when the charges were introduced.

From what I gather, the reasoning behind leaving the fly-tipped waste in the streets is that collecting it would effectively be rewarding the fly-tippers for their actions.

The opposite side of that coin, of course, is that not collecting it effectively makes innocent communities suffer for the actions of a few who break the rules.

There’s a term for this sort of thing: collective punishment. It’s been popular with various regimes down the centuries, although in certain extreme cases it was found to be a direct breach of the Geneva Convention.

Obviously, it would be unfair to compare the green waste issue to some of the more dreadful cases of collective punishment in the past.

For one thing, nobody is being murdered or chucked in jail.

For another, those earlier victims weren’t free to sue the people responsible for injuries they suffered, potentially draining vital resources that might have been better spent elsewhere.

Dirty deeds...

THE Food Standards Agency says we shouldn’t wash chicken for fear of spreading potentially deadly germs to work surfaces and other food.

I’m a bit bewildered by this. I don’t doubt that the agency has done its homework, but unless people are setting about their mucky fillets and drumsticks with supersoakers, or draining them by shaking them like maracas, it seems a bit of an overreaction.

Perhaps it would have been better just to advise us to dunk the meat in water rather than sticking it under a tap.