Bad porn

Did you have a nice day on Sunday? Do anything exciting? Maybe you went for a nice stroll by the river, took a trip to the beach (if you’re one of my fortunate Antipodean readers), or – always my preference, this – did a spot of shopping. You might have wandered round a good bookshop; that’s one of my favourite things to do on a Sunday, although Reading is limited in that respect. I like lovely independent bookshops, myself – like my favourite one in Bath, where they tell you to help yourself to a cup of coffee and have a proper look around, or the stunningly beautiful Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street. Places where you feel like the books have been hand picked by people who genuinely love to read rather than them being shunted into 3 for 2 offers because their publishers have handed over massive wodges of cash.

My Sunday? Well now, I’m glad you asked. After a long and richly-earned lie in, Kelly and I went for a farewell lunch with my uncle at one of my favourite restaurants. My roast beef was perfectly pink, the gravy was smoky and rich and they even had a starter with black pudding in it. Things simply couldn’t have been better.

“I’ve always said that I want to die at the age of 90, shot by a jealous husband while I approach the vinegar strokes with his beautiful wife.” said my uncle between mouthfuls, pausing only to wave his knife magisterially at some unwanted cauliflower, “Would either of you two like some more trees?”

We dropped him off outside my mother’s house, a building that is beginning to seem eerily like one I have never visited, amid warm embraces and promises to be considerably better at keeping in touch, and we drove home to the flat. Then I did what anyone might do on a Sunday afternoon. I fired up my laptop, read some blogs and checked my emails, that sort of thing. And once I was done with all of that, I went into Facebook and changed my profile picture to an image of a goth with a giant penis on the end of each wrist, trying to eat a plate of spaghetti with his bare - well, I’m using this word now in its very loosest sense - hands.

All things considered, it was a fairly ordinary Sunday.

Even as I was doing it - mainly because I foolishly agreed to do so several pints to the good on Friday night - I remember thinking Boy, this is the sort of thing that always seems to happen to me. It was in fact the culmination of a succession of events, all fairly bizarre in their own right, which started a couple of months ago.

The seeds of this particular misfortune began when Kelly and I went to visit my father the weekend before Christmas. Because we were going away for the festive season it was our final chance to do the family thing, to eat, drink, make merry and exchange presents. It was so early that the decorations weren’t even up, but the welcome couldn’t have been any warmer if the house had been festooned with tinsel. We were ushered through the front door, parted from our cumbersome bags and a sparkling champagne cocktail was pressed into our hands. We made ourselves comfortable on my dad’s swooshy cream leather sofas - sofas which never fail to make a gratifying farty noise every time you sit down, a joke that simply never gets old.

Our cares were over, and the season of goodwill was ready to begin. So naturally, this was the point at which my father decided to embark on a story about him and my stepmother watching porn together.

Really, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Like me, my dad has far fewer filters than he ought, and it’s not as if I didn’t know that he was partial to porn. We always knew where to find it when we were growing up. We didn’t have to wander off into the woods and find a random page snagged on a thicket somewhere like so many children of the eighties. All you had to do was go into my parents’ bedroom and look underneath my dad’s back issues of Practical Photography. Right at the bottom were a couple of manky copies of Escort and a Fiesta. You needed strong arms to lift the implausibly gigantic pile of magazines, but of course repeated masturbation could only help with that. Not that my brother needed my dad‘s porn collection, because I happen to know he had a copy of Penthouse under his bed. The one where you could see Madonna’s beaver and everything.

On an unconnected note, I never understood why they named two Ford cars after such prominent jazz mags. With hindsight, I wish they’d taken it a bit further; I reckon I might have stuck at the whole learning to drive palaver if at the end of the process I could have climbed into a brand new Vauxhall Razzle, or maybe even a Kia Jugs. But there you are.

Even though my dad clearly had form, I’m not sure any of this fully prepared me for the revelation about him and my stepmother sitting down of an evening to take in an adult movie side by side.

“It was a porn remake of a feature film.” said my father, somewhat misjudging the mood of the room in a way I’m no stranger to, “It was called Playmate Of The Apes.”

“I bet there must have been some great dialogue.” I said, “Get your hands on me, you damn dirty ape! and suchlike.”

“No, not really. To be honest, it was a bit disappointing. All the astronauts that crash landed on the planet were women, and there was a bit too much girl on girl for my liking.”

My pride evaporated in an instant, and I begun to wonder whether we were related after all.

“And all the apes were men, but I’ve never seen a gorilla in a pink furry body suit before.” said my father. I think he would have carried on in that vein for hours if my stepmother hadn’t forced him to eat a cheese straw and swiftly changed the subject.

I had plain forgotten about this incident until a slow day at work when we were on our way to the kitchen to make mediocre coffee #1. Gemma was warming her instant porridge up in the feeble microwave, which happens to be the slowest microwave in the entire world. You could almost certainly grow a potato in the time it takes to bake one. As we watched the sludgy mess bubbling lethargically through the grubby glass, I took it on myself to regale Gemma and Iain with the whole sorry story.

“I know there are loads of porn versions of normal films, like Shaving Ryan’s Privates and Hung Country For Young Men, but Playmate Of The Apes? I couldn’t believe it.”

[Incidentally, my favourite of these is definitely Heavy Petter And The Goblet Of Fur. You should see what Heavy Petter does in the Quidditch match when he gets his hands on the Golden Snatch. All right, I made it up, but someone really ought to make this movie.]

Iain visibly perked up at this point in that way you do when you know you have something phenomenal to bring to the discussion.

“That’s nothing. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Edward Cockhands.”

“Iain, you have got to be kidding me.”

“I’m not! We watched it on a stag night once. He’s got massive cocks for hands. It’s hilarious, I’m surprised we got to the end of it because we were all laughing so hard.”

Lunchtime was spent on the iPhone doing a quick (by which I mean extremely extensive) Google image search. It was very instructive. I learned several things as a result. The first was that the film is in fact called Edward Penishands and is considered a minor classic of the porn parody genre, featuring a finely nuanced performance by Sikki Nixx in the title role. The second was that Iain, rather terrifyingly, can do an uncanny impersonation of Edward’s come face. The third was that, as a consequence, I hope to God I never see Iain’s come face. The last, and possibly most useful, nugget of information was that it’s almost absurdly easy to put Gemma off her lunch by showing her a picture of Edward Penishands trying to eat a plate of spaghetti without the benefit of cutlery.

“Good god, I really hope it’s carbonara sauce that spaghetti is slathered in.” I said. That didn’t go down well either, apparently it's in poor taste or something.

Thinking on it some more I realised there was a sizeable list of logistical problems with having a giant bell end on the end of each wrist. How did you wipe your behind after going to the loo? Was giving people a round of applause an unexpected pleasure, or did it all get a bit vanilla? Speaking of vanilla, why would you bother buying an ice cream ever again, or for that matter leaving the house? I’m disappointed to say that, from what Iain managed to grasp of the plot of Edward Penishands it chose not to explore any of the thorny sociological issues thrown up by even a brief review of the central premise. Instead it featured a whole shedload of graphic shagging (shagging or fisting? I’m really not sure) and not much else. I for one would have enjoyed some deleted scenes where Edward tries to put a duvet in a duvet cover without making such a mess that the whole lot has to go back in the washing machine. Maybe one day they’ll do an edgy remake that fully exploits the artistic potential.

After that, Edward and his curious appendages completely slipped my mind, right up to last Friday night when I found myself down the Oakford with Mikey, his magnificent other half Rebecca and her friend Melanie. Melanie is sometimes on the funbus with Mikey and me, but rather sensibly she chooses not to get involved in our conversations, a decision which can only have been reinforced by the evening’s events. We found ourselves talking about Iain and Rebecca told me her brilliant story about how she first found out about Iain being so posh.

“I stopped by his desk for something work related and he had his full Highland regalia - the kilt, the sporran, the jacket - hanging up. ‘Are you going to a ball?’ I asked him. ‘No, I’m just off out for dinner with some friends tonight.’ he said, without batting an eyelid.”

“You know his nickname is ‘Chopper’, don’t you?” I said.

“Really?” said Melanie.

“Yes, rumour has it he’s hung like a draft excluder.” I said, on my way to being drunk and warming to my theme, “They do say that Iain is in fact a human tripod. Of course, he’s not as well endowed as Edward Penishands.”

“Who’s Edward Penishands?”

So I told them. Then, because I’m not about doing things by halves, I showed them the picture of him eating the spaghetti. I’m not going to post a picture on the blog because it‘s disgusting and it might get me closed down by the Blogger police. But if you‘re really that curious, drop me a mail and I‘ll send it to you.

“That’s absolutely disgusting, nice one.” said Melanie. “You should have that as your Facebook profile picture.”

Full of bravado, this suddenly sounded like the funniest idea I had ever heard in my entire life. That’s usually when I get into trouble.

“I tell you what.” I said. “If you add me as a Facebook friend, I’ll change my profile picture to that for the rest of the weekend.”

“Do it for a whole week and it’s a deal.”

This appeared to be an eminently sensible suggestion. Of course, later on many things would seem sensible that probably weren‘t. Embarking on a personal quest to try and consume as many different kinds of alcoholic drink as humanly possible, for example, not to mention going to “Chicken Cottage” at two in the morning and eating a chicken burger which had probably been injected with enough water to rehydrate a Sudanese village. But all that was several hours and many, many drinks away.

“All right, you’re on.”