One of John Cleese’s many memorable lines in Fawlty Towers was a typically waspish dig at his wife, Sybil, for ’stating the bleedin’ obvious’. That phrase sprang immediately to mind when I came across a full page article in The Times this week headlined ‘Sex, sexuality and the over 60s’. Under a sub-heading, ‘Ground-breaking study of 3,000 people’, the article drew on a survey of 3000 Americans aged from 57 to 85 in the ‘ultra respectable New England Journal of Medicine’, and came up with such earth-shattering conclusions as ’sex looms large in the lives of the over-60s’ and ‘age plays a smaller part in sexual activity than attitude. You are as young, and sexy, as you feel’.
Amazing, stunning, utterly incredible. What will these gods of medical knowledge reveal to us next? I can hardly wait for them to pour out more of their transcendental wisdom. In the meantime I’ll carry on with my life, eternally grateful to them for confirming what I and millions like me knew all along – that feeling horny doesn’t disappear as soon as the grey hairs appear – despite the ‘Old people having sex jokes’ that were printed alongside The Times article. My two favourites were Joan Rivers ‘It’s so long since I’ve had sex that I’ver forgotten who ties up whom’ and George Burns ‘Sex at 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.’ Boom, boom.
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