Pity Rupert Campbell-Black. The fictional star of Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles saga has been groping, grabbing and thrusting his way through equestrian society since he first appeared in the pages of Riders, in 1985, regularly ripping knickers in the tack room and wowing the ladies, as he did to Petra, aka Podge the stable girl, with empowering compliments such as, “Christ, you’ve got gorgeous boobs.” The 67-year-old former show jumper (he was a “60-year-old silver fox” in the 2016 novel Mount!) is apparently back in “action” for Cooper’s latest, the forthcoming Tackle! This time, and presumably with a knapsack of Viagra slung over his shoulder, he has abandoned the horsey world and bought a struggling football club. There he will encounter the team’s “ravishing and adorable secretary, Tember West”, plus the “sassy press officer, Dora Belvedon”, and several “glamorous WAGs”.
And when I say he’s going to “encounter” those gorgeous young fillies what I really mean is, well, actually he’ll probably just shake their hands and go back to the sudoku and a cuppa. Because Cooper has admitted that, when it comes to sex scenes these days, she’s at something of a disadvantage. “I’m 86, and I’ve forgotten how to do it,” she said recently. She’s joked before with Graham Norton about ageing and sex, and forgetting how it all works. But this is the first time she’s implied that it’s hit the writing too. “It’s quite difficult to write sex scenes,” she said. “You can’t go on finding ways to do it differently.”
Never fear, oh great queen of raunch, sexual amnesia might ultimately turn out to be a creative boon. Because, invariably, the worst part of any novel, even the novels of Cooper, is the sex. Yes, as a teenager, I memorised huge chunks of Riders (who didn’t?), but secretly knew that the rumpy-pumpy of Rupert Campbell-Black was utterly ridiculous and in some cases just badly written. Petra for instance, sits astride of Rupert (of course she does — it’s a horsey thing) while he admires her “breasts swaying like party balloons when the front door opens”. Huh? Ours usually blow across the driveway or get popped in the door jamb.
• At 86 I’ve forgotten how to write sex scenes, says Jilly Cooper
It’s oddly reminiscent of that surreal moment in EL James’s bad sex classic Fifty Shades of Grey when the impressionable graduate Anastasia Steele describes her first night of passion with the dimwit business magnate Christian Gray thus: “Suddenly, he sits up and tugs my panties off and throws them on the floor. Pulling off his boxer briefs, his erection springs free.” I picture Anastasia with a butterfly net, dashing about Grey’s billionaire man-pad, trying desperately to catch his springy member while the cheeky little brat, like the Gingerbread Boy of fable, giggles and leaps and knocks over priceless vases, forcing Anastasia to remark, as she does incessantly throughout the book, “Holy crap!”
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And that is, of course, because sex is fundamentally absurd. To write about and to do. And anybody who has ever had the privilege of doing it without simultaneously acknowledging, even in the tiniest part of their soul, that it’s inherently ridiculous (those bonking puppets are funny in Team America: World Police because they are us) will probably end up producing novels filled with badly written sex. Even the “proper” writers regularly mess up sex scenes. Ian McEwan, Anaïs Nin, Joyce Carol Oates? Awful, awful, po-faced, super-serious, thrusting, slithering, poking, “hungry” sex.
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My advice? As someone with two published novels out there (available in all good…), both of which feature sex scenes, this is ultimately how I did it. Pay close attention. In my debut novel, The Fields, a first-person narrative, the main characters have sex. I always knew they would. I always knew I had to include it. So these are the words that I wrote. “We sneak upstairs, pull the curtains closed and have complete and uninhibited nudey-nudey action. And it’s brilliant.” End of. No thrusting, no writhing, no humping, knicker-ripping, ecstatic moaning, groaning or metaphorical balloon-bobbing, willy-leaping nonsense.
Cooper has thus been given a gift. By forgetting how to write about sex she has been belatedly liberated to turn her writerly attentions elsewhere. She can finally focus on the important subjects that matter most as human beings negotiate this heady mess of life. Such as? God knows. As Rupert Campbell-Black would say, without sex, what’s the point?
SMH at the new acronyms
What do David Cameron and my mother have in common? They both, at one time, signed off their texts with LOL, not realising that the text-speak acronym stands for “Laugh Out Loud” and not, alas, “Lots of Love”. Informing my mother of her mistake with a huge OMG (Oh My God) made me feel young, and hip, and TBH (To Be Honest), one of the kids.
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Now, alas, I am SMH (shaking my head) because a new survey into workplace texting habits has exposed my utter ignorance of the complexity of contemporary acronyms. WIIFM, apparently, was the most baffling for old farts, yours truly included, and means What’s In It For Me? Can’t say I’ll be using that too often, unless, say, a colleague begs me to review Tackle! Although I confess that I do love TL;DR, meaning Too Long; Didn’t Read, which I plan to heavily deploy (mostly, though, for Tackle!).
Other gems include LET for Leaving Early Today (yeah, fat chance), and B2B and G2G, for Back to Back and Good to Go (alas, as I’m not a US marine, I won’t be firing them out either). Most infuriating, though, is NRN, which stands for No Reply Needed and is, get this, a diminution of the existing acronym NNTR, for No Need to Reply, because think of all the time you’ll save without typing that one extra letter. To quote TV’s “cool dad” Phil Dunphy (Ty Burrell) from season one of Modern Family, “WTF! Why the Face?”
