How can we all improve our quality of life? Well, 105 year old Clara Meadmore has the answer - stay a virgin and don't waste your time thinking about sex.
"I imagine there's a lot of hassle involved and I've always been busy doing other things" she says. "I made up my mind at the age of 12 never to marry and I've never gone back on that."
The Cornish centenarian
insists she's never even tried it. And why should I doubt her? She maintains gardening, cooking and listening to the radio are pleasure enough.
She may have a point. Just think of all the time we fritter away satisfying our carnal lusts. Not to mention all the texts, emails, phone calls and feverish daydreams hoping for more of the same.
Without all that, office productivity would rocket, we would pay more attention to the world's problems, we would remember that upcoming wedding anniversary, and we would finally get to grips with Marcel Proust.
There'd be no more squeezing into overtight dresses, teetering on painful heels, or stuffing socks down Y-fronts. Oh, and I wouldn't have wasted hundreds of hours obsessing over my totally unreciprocated longings for the gorgeous
Elena*.
Actually, remarkable as it may seem, sex hardly crossed my mind until my early twenties. Even at boarding school, I never joined the other boys in their furtive fumblings under the bedclothes. But once I discovered this age-old pursuit, there was no looking back. Clara Meadmore I was not.
But if we'd all been virgins our entire life, would we actually have missed all those sweaty couplings? Or would we just wonder why other people were so fixated on fleeting orgasms and why they spent so much time chasing after them?
How much of our sexual appetite is fed by outside influences and how much is a natural impulse? The two are so entangled, it's impossible to say.
* The name has been changed to avoid marital disharmony
