The Thinking Allowed Newsletter: The Kissing fields

Whenever I took a new girl friend home for the first time I had to brace myself for my mother's embarrassing doorstep attempts at immediate intimacy.

"Hello, mum", I'd say as she opened the door. "This is Cecilia". "Lovely to meet you", my mother would say.

"Now, do we kiss?"

I knew only too well from experience that this simple question was the prelude to a wholly predictable sequence in which my mother would lean forward to kiss Cecilia on the cheek, but would do so with such a degree of uncertainty and hesitation that Cecilia (or Barbara or Marjorie) would have little clue as to which of her cheeks was the target for my mother's puckered lips.

When one adds in the additional complication that my mother's kiss was being initiated from the top step, while Cecilia was firmly located on the bottom, it becomes easier to understand the ensuing concatenation of lips and cheeks and mumbled apologies.

I'm too much of a sociologist to believe that my own troubled adolescent experience of social kissing had a genetic component but some sort of special explanation would seem to be needed for the several years in which my inability to perform properly on doorsteps meant that very few girls ever volunteered for a second date.

Timing was one problem.

In films lovers always seemed able to synchronise their kissing. They came together harmoniously. This never seemed to work for me. I'd decide that the moment had arrived only to be told by my new beloved that I should back off so as to give her time to finish her sentence or put out her Woodbine.

But even more troubling was my obsessive anxiety about whether I should kiss to the right or the left. On several occasions I'd got it wrong, inclining my head to the right or the left and then discovering that my new sweetheart's face had gone in the same direction so that we both looked as though we were not so much trying to embrace as to peer over each other's shoulders.

I tried to get the problem sorted out by watching how Clark Gable and James Mason and Stewart Granger got to grips with their leading ladies. But as these actors tended to be filmed in profile and to enjoy their romantic encounters on deserted beaches or on moonlit balconies rather than on the steps of terraced houses in Bootle, it was difficult to draw any direct parallels.

Even more disastrous was my attempt to follow my friend Jim's instructions on the proper way to manage a "French Kiss".

"Just slide your tongue slowly between her lips", he told me. "Like posting a letter".

"And then?" I said.

"And then move your tongue around a bit", he said. "There's nothing more to it."

Two nights later I tested Jim's instructions on Marjorie. A normal kiss at first. Not too bad. She didn't recoil. And I'd managed to land the kiss more or less on the centre of her mouth. And then, very slowly, I unleashed my tongue. Like posting a letter. But then came the rebuff - a rebuff which was to set back my attempts at French kissing for the best part of five years.

"Wait a minute", said Marjorie, pushing me away. "I can't do that".

"You can't?" I said.

"Not until I've taken out me Juicy Fruit" said Marjorie.

Attitudes to kissing are under discussion this week when I meet the author of a research paper on the growing popularity of kissing between heterosexual men.

Plus an interview with Steven Pinker, the author of Better Angels of Our Nature one of the most significant and controversial books published in the last twelve months.

Laurie Taylor presents Thinking Allowed

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