This charming, if slightly repetitive, lo-fi calypso tune was released on Escort in 1970. Lord Spoon appears to be an alias of Shirley ‘Calypso’ Williams, who also worked under the name of Mix Flour & Sugar. It was under that name that he recorded one of the great double-entendre titles, Screw the Cock Tight in 1978.
Given it’s a calypso tune, my mind inevitably turns to the Caribbean, so I’m dedicating this post to a couple of people, such as the two different women that my wife and I met while we were holidaying in Saint Lucia, last year, who asked us whether we were on our honeymoon simply because they saw us either sharing some kisses in the hotel pool or cuddling up and sharing the occasional kiss while on a boat trip out to the Pitons. In reality, the holiday was an advanced tenth wedding anniversary gift to ourselves. We were both flattered and slightly deflated by these assumptions. Flattered because it was nice to see people were moved by our affection for one another to assume that we were newly-weds, but at the same time it left us both wondering just what sort of state their relationships must be in if a couple showing each other some affection in public could only be down to them honeymooning.
How would they have coped had they been sitting behind the young couple that I was sat behind on a bus journey that I took between Truro and Falmouth on Wednesday 3 September 2008. On that day, I witnessed one of the most staggering and passionate displays of mutual public affection that I’ve ever seen.
The reason why I can be so specific about the date and the memory of it is down to two things:
1) It was the day before I was due to move to Ireland to join my future wife and to take a Masters degree at the University of Limerick.
2) I was convinced that I actually knew one of the couple, and spent the whole journey trying to establish whether it was them.
I can’t remember whether I got on the bus before them or not, but I was sat behind them, until they got off (the bus), halfway through. For the vast majority of the journey, they were kissing. And these weren’t mere pecks at each other but lengthy, languorous, romantic kisses. If the bus had crashed and exploded, they wouldn’t have noticed. On the contrary, they would have died exactly as they would have wished - in one another’s arms and locked into each other’s kiss. They went on so long, that eventually, I stopped looking out of the window, and just watched them. They clearly didn’t give a damn, so why not.
In the brief moments they weren’t tongue wrestling, they sat staring into each other’s eyes. I saw that the girl in particular was completely oblivious to anything other than her man’s face. And it was that moment that I started to wonder about her. She looked the spitting image of Sarah-Jane Davies, a girl I had been on the BTEC Diploma in Performing Arts course with between 1992-94. Was it her? She looked exactly as she had done at college, but this didn’t seem to tally with the last time I had seen her, which was when I was working in a sports shop in Truro, circa 1998/99. Back then, she’d grown her hair long, dyed it blonde and introduced me to an older man, who was her husband. If this was Sarah-Jane, she’d reverted back to the brunette bob that she had in college, and the husband was long gone judging by the look of the man she was with on the bus.
Alas, I never found out if it was Sarah-Jane. She never looked anywhere else but at her man, and in no time at all, they were kissing the faces off one another again. In the circumstances, I felt that my gently calling her name might look a bit weird. There was also an element of thinking that there was no point making even casual acquaintanceship given that I was off to make a new life the following day. So, I told myself that it was her and sat back to watch them kiss, while I ran a few lewd thoughts through my mind about the show I was being given.
All I can tell you is that whether the girl on the bus was Sarah-Jane or not, her lucky partner found himself sharing the journey with a girl who, on that day, looked ready to love in the nighttime, morning time, afternoon time, weekend, bank holidays….. And if the cock didn’t get screwed tight that evening, I’d be amazed.
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