This week sees a jet-setting makeover for Creaming Spires. Christmas was busy for your tawdry journalist sans frontiers: romantic opportunities arose in the form of a francophone skiing holiday, complete with sexually-charged chairlift rides and steamy vin-chaud piss-ups.
Sex transcends language barriers. In the incontrovertible words of Jason Derulo, “Been around the world don’t speak the language/but your booty don’t need explaining”. Who would need to explain my booty? How might they do so, and why? The language of sex is surely universal, constructed of a grammar of magnetism, a vocabulary of blow-jobs and bases.
However, my conviction that my body could “do all the talking” first wavered last summer, following an ocean fumble with a Dutchman named Jelle. Though the spelling conjured up an immediate “…and ice cream”, “Jelle” was actually pronounced “Yolo”, and it was possibly this invitation to hedonism rather than actual attraction that led me to romp with him into the waves of Barcelona beach, flinging bikini bottoms to the four winds. But the throes of watery passion were somewhat marred by Mr Yolo’s sex-clamations learnt from American porn. “FACKING GUT,” he cried repeatedly, as my flip-flop bobbed balefully past.
A year on, I again find myself naked and desperately trying to decipher the amorous whisperings of a continental lay. Unadulterated animal desire has got us this far, but it cannot convey such complicated ideas as “would you mind licking my left ear a little more softly?” Mime (tricky in the chalet darkness) gets me a condom and a sheepish “voilà” from Monsieur Amour: I smugly attempt wordplay on the similarity between the French for condom (préservatif) and his optimistic supply of contraception (présomptif). Sadly, it emerges that the latter is a false friend used mainly in medicinal law and a confused ‘ouf’ cements my suspicion that passion can indeed be lost in translation. I leave the chalet in yesterday’s clothes and board a 6am coach, the first leg of my international walk of shame back to London. Alas, the language of love is not universal.
