Standard of crosswords still quite good, though

Question in today’s Times, summarised:

“I just walked in on my 15-year-old son having sex with a girl he barely knows in our living room and I’m not sure how to talk to him about it.”

Answer, summarised:

“Look up your local STD clinics and leave a glass jar of loose condoms in the bathroom, topping it up occasionally so you can never really tell if the level goes down.”

Did you know the Times was once considered so important to the British way of life that Goebbels ordered a daily translation?

Is there coursework?

I try not to channel surf. As far as I’m concerned, you decide what you want to watch, you watch it, and you turn it off.

Should you occasionally lapse, you apparently run the risk of accidentally catching a few minutes of Channel 4’s Sex Education Show, Tuesday night, 8pm, and if that doesn’t cure you of the habit then nothing will. In this one, a class of kids were being shown pictures of Kelly Osborne, Chris Martin and Daniel Radcliffe, and being invited to guess at what age they lost their virginities. The correct answer was then revealed to a breathless world.

Wow. Is it actually written into their contract, do you think, that having Done the Deed our modern day teen idols are then obliged to make a public disclosure? Or if not public, then at least to Channel 4’s researchers? Is there a register somewhere? Maybe a web page?

And no, I’m not revealing the answers.

I believe the point was to show young people that, look, you don’t need to rip your pants off the moment you hit puberty and it is acceptable to wait a couple of days. It might have failed in that regard. Still, cudos to Chris Martin for (a) at least managing to last until he was out of his teens and (b) for not being famous at the time (based on the fact that “Trouble” came out in 2000 – oh dear lord, I can’t believe I’m making this mental calculation. Stop it stop it stop it) and therefore possibly succeeding on the grounds of, I dunno, personality or even, who knows, a bit of affection and respect and mutual liking.

I can safely say Mr Martin’s school didn’t have classes like that – at least, it didn’t 12 years earlier when I was there.