And What Is Wrong With Being Different Anyway?

     I just read a really nice story, linked to on Twitter, about the Krankies. You remember the Krankies, they were always on telly when I was a kid, and when I found out that Jimmy Krankie was really a woman, not only that, but a midget who was married to the chap playing her dad, my brain fried a little bit. Young brains are really not meant to endure such lines of thought. And so they passed out of time and mind until I read this report in the Daily Record. Apparently, if you don't want to read it, they were avid swingers for many years during their panto and TV careers. At first this made my young self pop up, already weirded out by the aforementioned thing about him being married to the small woman who dressed as a schoolboy and pretended to be his son, and do a passing imitation of Munch's Scream face as it went into meltdown. 

    After recovering from this, I then read the article again, and it was actually a gentle article, it passed no judgement on their swinging lifestyle, it was just a very frank interview. Ian even admitted to punching Paul Daniels in the mouth once, for which he is now one of the few people in my hall of heroes. I was impressed that this story dripped into a smallish paper with a nice, laid back story about a one-time celebrity couple who engaged in a swinging lifestyle. If the Mail or Express or the Sun had broken the story, I can't imagine how terrible it would be, how very judgemental. How damaging. Let's face it, these papers do not typically shy away from taking the moral high ground against anybody. Look at the way the Sun cried and pointed the finger at the Guardian over the phone hacking story when it was revealed that there wasn't enough evidence to say that the NOTW journalists had actually deleted Milly Dowler's messages. They sulked and pouted and cried that it was unfair reporting, including demanding that Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, should have been sacked for the story. That the NOTW had actually hacked the phone of a missing schoolgirl was irrelevant, morally. They had been hard done to and they demanded some recompense. Anne Diamond said it best to these wailing fucking babies on Newsnight; "Now you know how it feels, that sense of moral outrage."

   I digress, as I often do when an opportunity presents itself to plant a boot in the guts of the vile gutter press. My point really is that it is nice that in 2011 Britain, a former celebrity couple feel OK to come forward and say "Yeah, we had a swinging lifestyle. We had sex with lots of other people, and look at us. We're still together after 42 years." That is a nice reflection on how cool Britain is gradually becoming. As religion slowly fades into the background and it's high-horse moralising and finger wagging becomes more and more irrelevant to most Brits, we feel more comfortable every decade with alternative lifestyles. Even Facebook has an option for 'open relationship'. Whilst it is still seen by many as a taboo subject, I think the younger generation are more and more at ease with homosexuality, bisexuality (although bi people weirdly come in for a lot of stick from some in the gay community, as though sexuality is some kind of bipolar thing rather than a continuum), transgenderism, and polyamory. They see their parents getting divorced (current studies show that between 50 and 33% of marriages end in divorce) and realise that monogamy doesn't always work. In fact, doesn't often work. If marriage breaks down almost half the time, then marriage isn't working no matter how much the Tories would like to shoehorn couples into it.

    I believe that sex outside a relationship, with the permission and trust of the other person, can serve several very useful functions. Firstly, as a pressure valve. If the sex in the main relationship is getting stale or simply not happening enough to suit a highly sexed person, then going out and finding it elsewhere lets them get their rocks off and takes the pressure off the partner with the lower sex drive. Secondly, it takes away that feeling of the grass being greener on the other side that so often entices people away from their partners - you get to go roll around in that grass, have a good play in it, then think, actually, the grass was fine where I was, but this was fun. You can play the field *and* still have someone to share a long-term genuine love with. Finally, if pressures build up in the main relationship, having other lovers to talk to and spend good times with can help put those pressures into perspective rather than the usual closed system of the married pressure cooker. If a couple can challenge their own jealousies enough to do it, then I'd say do it. Maybe marriages would last longer if more people were like the Krankies. And, as more of these young, accepting folk with all of these alternative lifestyles mature, we'll see if I'm right, and maybe, as this generation comes to the fore and the older, Mail-reading, Tory voting generation die off, society will become a bit more accepting, a bit more open-minded, and a bit more of a lovely place. And then the USA, which by then will be a massive church-driven theocracy with Tea Partiers at the helm, will nuke us for being a godless, liberal bunch of stinking communists on welfare.