Another voice
Instant sunshine
Auberon Waugh
The Castle Hotel, Taunton, is one of those institutions which make me proud to be a Somerset man. Its cellar is one of the best in the country and its food is crying out for a second Michelin star. On Saturday it held a concert given by three doctors and a journalist, Miles Kington, the man who single-handedly has to con- vince us that the Times retains a sense of humour under its present dreary editor. They perform as a group called Instant Sunshine, singing songs which are merci- fully untopical. I heard them a few years ago when they appeared as the cabaret at a ball in Berkshire and was only fairly impressed, but on this occasion, before a Taunton audience in God's own county, they provoked scenes such as have not been seen since the 1978 mass suicide at Jonestown in Guyana. People fell off their chairs and rolled on the ground. Even the pretty young wife of my fishmonger in Bath Place was weeping. It was as if the whole room had been visited by a sort of hysterical happiness at the sight of these three capering doctors and a capering journalist.
Nobody was happier than the perfor- mers themselves. Afterwards I learned that one of them was the consultant venereologist at a famous London teaching hospital. He was the happiest of the lot, jumping up and down and singing about his allotment garden or whatever. It occurred to me that next to being the resident humorist on the Times, the job of consul- tant venereologist at an important London teaching hospital must be just about the gloomiest available at a time when Aids threatens to become a pandemic and everybody is calling for the declaration of a national emergency.
The truth turns out to be what I had suspected all along, that there is virtually no danger of a major epidemic. The disease, although extraordinarily un- pleasant and almost invariably fatal, is actually fairly hard to catch, outside the special circumstances of sodomy, infected blood transfusion and infected needles, all of which should be easy enough to control once the dangers are known. Does any- body now remember the herpes scare of two years ago, or the once widely held theory that under-arm deodorants were blotting out the sun, poisoning the iono- sphere and subjecting us all to deadly gamma rays? The herpes scare, we now learn, was entirely got up by the press. Genital herpes has always existed and done nobody much harm; people did not bother to report it before it became fashionable, and it never appeared in the Central Statistical Office's Social Trends until peo- ple started taking an interest in 1982, when newly published figures made it look like a new disease.
It now appears that the threat of serious environmental damage from the use of aerosol canisters was pure fiction, as the danger of a nuclear winter appears to be. All these things are thought up by puritans and left-wingers for their own purposes. I am happy to assure people from my own inquiries that there is virtually no possibil- ity of the disease increasing at its present rate for more than two years, and no possibility at all that it will follow the projection of the Royal College of Nursing to the point of a million new cases in six years' time.
I am happy ,to give this assurance, but the reasons for it are rather disgusting, and those of a delicate or refined sensibility may choose to stop reading at this point. Perhaps it is squeamishness which prevents press, radio and television from reassuring male homosexualists that all they have to do to avoid spreading (but not catching) the disease is to wear a condom while indulging their pleasure in sodomy. But it begins to look to me, from the sort of briefing which Andrew Brown apparently received from the Royal College of Nurs- ing Kan we help Aids?' 19 January) that there may be some sort of conspiracy not to reassure these unfortunate people, to leave them in ignorance in the hope that they will mend their ways. There is certainly a conspiracy among some people in the DHSS, the Department of Transport and the British Medical Association to mislead us about drink and driving. Perhaps the same crowd are involved in the attempt to wipe out sodomy — a rather more praise- worthy aim, in my view, but if their activity results in unnecessary deaths from this unpleasant disease, they should not be encouraged.
The truth of the matter would appear to be as follows. Aids is carried in certain bodily fluids — blood, lymph, sperm, urine and possibly, but not certainly, in saliva but can be communicated only through an open cut or wound into the bloodstream of the recipient. The reason it is easily com- municated in anal intercourse, but most rarely in vaginal intercourse, is that the wall of the rectum, being constructed of more delicate tissues than the vagina, almost always suffers lesions in the course of buggery, just as the sphincter is fre- quently torn at the moment of entry.
There we are then. I do not wish to enter into any correspondence on this matter, and will answer no letters. I am not the Spectator 23 February 1985 Spectator's family doctor. But I think it needs to be said that we are most unlikely to contract Aids if we can steer clear of being buggered, receiving blood transfu- sions, using dirty hypodermic needles or allowing those affected to spit or pee on our open wounds. There is no need to avoid the company of homosexualists un- less one would wish to do so in any case. One effect of the present scare which seems to me entirely beneficial is to have knocked a little of the shine off the arrogance of those who announce them- selves as leaders of the Gay Community. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that Mrs Margaret Hodge, leader of Islington Coun- cil, chose last week to reveal that she had referred a proposal by her Gay and Les- bian Sub-Committee to send council work- ers on courses to cure them of tetero- sexism' back for further study. She wishes to know whether this proposal has any relevance to Islington's policies. Perhaps, as St Peregrine has suggested, it really is a moral issue. Perhaps as i Andrew Brown has suggested, God is intending to punish the entire human race. He is no longer content to make the Bishop of Durham skip and jump a little as He throws the occasional thunderbolt. Last Sunday was celebrated as unemployment Sunday in South Yorkshire, and the Bishop of Sheffield stood in his al Cathedr to announce that a community in which there were large numbers of unemployed was a sinful community. Unemployment was a community sin, he said.
The Lord will smite thee with botch of Egypt, and with the emerods, and with the scab, and with the itch whereof thou cattst not be healed. The Lord will smite thee with madness and blindness and astonishment of heart. And thou shaltgrope at noonday as the blind gropeth in darkness and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore andd Ito man 2nstll9)save thee.... . . (Deute x ro n m But I prefer to believe that it is chieflY the queens He is getting at, having found their your a trifle too flaunting and Moreover the Lord saith, because the daugh- ters of Zion are haughty and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes' walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet: Therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the hea.„‘I of the daughters of Zion and the Lord wit! discover their secret parts. . . . (Isaiah hi But all they really have to do, these daughters of Zion, is to wear a condom. It is not too undignified, really. Many te sexualists have been using them for years. r The next Great Debate is whethheertrl: Prison Department should issue prisoners in male prisons with these objects to indulge in activities which are against prison regulations.
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