LAST Thursday morning, as I drove to my place of work, I was thinking almost non-stop about sex.
Now please don’t get me wrong.
I wasn’t, you know . . . thinking about doing it. I was thinking about thinking about doing it which, you must agree, is a different thing altogether.
The reason for this apparent aberration was that the boys in the white lab coats have been at it again with their research projects and getting themselves written up in the newspapers, which I suspect is what they want in the first place.
Thursday mornings are when I write, for the Examiner, these insightful analyses of the human condition in the early years of the 21st century, and last Thursday I had read in the Daily Telegraph that scientists in America at the Ohio State University had been carrying out a study into how many times a day people think about sex.
This topic drew me inexorably into its intellectual coils which is why last Thursday morning I was thinking creatively about it before getting to my office premises and sitting down to the keyboard.
Let us now get on with what the scientists have discovered.
They recruited 163 people aged 18 to 25 and asked them to count up and report how often they thought about sex in one day.
Men, we are now told, think about it an average 19 times a day. Women don’t have it on their minds so much. They think about it only 10 times.
What this tells us about women, especially those aged 18 to 25, is not explained and it’s no business of the likes of me anyway.
I have also been curious about the way in which the 163 (and why 163 for goodness sake?) men and women provided the information required. I picture the scene.
They are sitting round the lab doing nothing much and then one man stands up and shouts: ‘Hey Prof. I’ve just thought about sex.’
Prof smiles with approval. ‘That’s great son,’ he says. ‘Just write it down on the pad I gave you.’
Then a pretty girl does it. ‘Now then my dear,’ says Prof. ‘Just come into my private rooms and we can talk about it.’
Now that really would be useful scientific research.
There was another story of academic endeavour in the same newspaper. Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh (it always seems to be Americans) have found that eating baked or grilled fish at least once a week can delay the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease, loss of memory and dementia.
But I went straight back to the thinking about sex piece.
You must admit, it’s a lot sexier than baked fish.
MANX Radio newsman Howard Caine tells me he had to think quickly when he was confronted live on air with a story about a man’s car being swept away in the River Neb.
It read: ‘He was attempting to cross the water splash on the Brack-a-Broom Road near Tynwald Mills but his Citroen Picasso was swept nearly quarter-of-a-mule downstream.’
This must have caused the emergency services a lot of donkey work.
BRENDA Cretney was upset by the spelling in an advertisement in the Isle of Man Courier saying: ‘Win four tickets to see Blake or one of two runner-up prizes of there latest album.’
Their their Brenda.