Nicholas Consolation, a mild-mannered grandfather in his mid-70s, is the very soul of discretion.
A heritage steam railway fanatic — he volunteers with the Bluebell Line in West Sussex — cricket aficionado and elder of his native free church in South-East London, he went to public faculty, progressed seamlessly and with distinction to Cambridge and has loved a profession as a journalist, author and political adviser.
He attire with conservatism, his hair is neatly barbered and his manner youthful.
Nicholas Consolation, the one little one of the late Dr Alex Consolation who authored The Pleasure of Intercourse, and spouse Jeanette
The Pleasure of Intercourse, launched in 1972, has bought greater than 12 million copies and has been translated into 30 languages
You would be forgiven for pondering, along with his irreproachable credentials and impeccably respectable hobbies, that he was the product of a completely typical middle-class upbringing.
However how misleading appearances are! For Nick is the one little one of the late Dr Alex Consolation; writer of The Pleasure Of Intercourse, the ground-breaking erotic handbook with which his identify grew to become synonymous. And this yr marks 50 years since its publication.
Not that his son, it turns into readily obvious, shares his father’s ease with eroticism. Convey up the topic of intercourse and he deflects it deftly.
Was he a proponent of free love as a younger man within the Swinging Sixties?
‘I used to be closely into music. I went to a Pink Floyd all-nighter and noticed the Stones at Hyde Park,’ he discloses as if that is probably the most shameful act of depravity.
‘However I am not going to do a Nick Clegg and inform you what number of sexual companions I’ve had,’ he provides, considerably primly. The previous Lib Dem chief infamously instructed an interviewer he had slept with ‘not more than 30 girls’.
‘Let’s simply say I got here away from college an ideal deal extra skilled than after I went to it,’ Nick provides in his genial, family-friendly manner.
As father-son dynamics go, it is arduous to think about yet one more polar reverse — though there are hints of mischief beneath Nick’s outward conservatism.
He married his third spouse, former bunny lady Jeanette, with whom he now lives in South London, after assembly her on a prepare. Even so, it’s a lot simpler to envisage Nick writing a political treatise than a ‘tips on how to’ e book on his bed room antics.
The Pleasure Of Intercourse, with its mixture of humour and frankness, piloted us by way of the mechanics of imaginative love-making, its illustrations displaying a pair within the throes of ecstasy, adventurous experimentation and post-coital bliss.
It was divided into Starters, Major Programs and Sauces and Pickles, it was loosely modelled on the Pleasure Of Cooking; and simply because the culinary handbook needed to induce proficiency within the kitchen, Dr Consolation’s e book aimed to make its readers able to Cordon Bleu intercourse.
It has bought greater than 12 million copies, been translated into 30 languages and terribly when it was launched in 1972, on an keen public rising from the constraints of post-Conflict prudishness, it was thought of wildly outre.
Laborious to consider now, in a world of untrammelled web porn, that the summer season earlier than ‘Pleasure’ (Nick’s candy abbreviation) was printed, Britain had been enthralled by a excessive courtroom trial, through which the editors of the satirical journal Oz have been discovered responsible of obscenity for publishing a sexualised parody of Rupert Bear.
Half a century in the past, The Pleasure Of Intercourse brought on an identical public furore, but at this time its message appears affectingly ethical.
‘You do not get high-quality intercourse with out love and suggestions,’ opined its writer, who truly loved a very racy intercourse life himself.
Whereas married to Ruth, Nick’s mum, whom he met at Cambridge College, Alex Consolation loved an affair with Ruth’s finest pal Jane Henderson, whom he went on to marry.
Dr Consolation and his second spouse then emigrated to America, the place they grew to become enthusiastic adherents of free love, becoming a member of the Sandstone Retreat, a clothing-optional, open-sexuality resort for swingers within the Santa Monica Mountains.
Poor outdated Nick. We are able to solely think about his chagrin.
‘My mom was not probably the most tactile of individuals and Jane, presumably, was,’ Nick says with great understatement.
‘Dad was dividing his time between mum and Jane and this association nearly grew to become a set state.
‘However then his analysis work (into gerontology, the examine of ageing) at College Faculty London got here to an finish, he went to America and ‘Pleasure’ got here out.
‘Dad instructed me later there have been fairly a couple of gerontologists at Sandstone. He mentioned all of them had a continual worry of their very own mortality which made them wish to take pleasure in life extra.’
His mom will need to have been damage by the betrayal, absolutely?
‘It will have been unimaginable for her to not have been,’ concedes Nick.
‘And in an excellent world Dad would have appreciated to not have made a proper cut up. However Jane was the needier of the 2. My mom was higher capable of operate on her personal.
‘The truth is I believe she discovered Dad’s mental explosiveness and high-octane thoughts troublesome to dwell with and, though she was damage, in a roundabout way not having him round gave her an opportunity to get better.
‘Dad was nonetheless very keen on Mum and he felt desperately conflicted.’
Whereas Alex and Jane threw themselves into their libertine way of life, they have been mercifully reticent concerning the goings on in California each time they met Nick.
‘I believe they believed that what went on in Sandstone, stayed in Sandstone,’ he says.
‘Sarcastically, Dad was a reasonably non-public man. He did not discuss his personal intercourse life. Only a few folks do. He talked in generalities somewhat than within the explicit.’
However even earlier than his father went on his odyssey of sexual experimentation, and printed The Pleasure Of Intercourse — which was based mostly on his erotic adventures with Jane — he was making radical pronouncements.
Nick was 17 and a boarder at Highgate Faculty in North London when Dr Consolation introduced, daringly, on a radio broadcast — this was 1963 — that no accountable teenage boy ought to go to a celebration with out a condom in his pocket.
‘I wasn’t embarrassed till folks began teasing me about it,’ says Nick. ‘And so they did.’
If he availed himself of his father’s recommendation at that stage, it was redundant.
Dr Consolation, pictured, loved an affair along with his spouse’s finest pal Jane Henderson, whom he went on to marry
‘There was various intercourse occurring, however primarily to different folks,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t a late developer by the requirements of the time, though I used to be by at this time’s, however the pace at which you developed trusted if you met ladies.’
And so they have been skinny on the bottom at boys’ boarding colleges.
‘The headmaster was most involved about stopping gay actions within the dormitories. And once we left he gave a speech and mentioned, “Above all, by no means consort with prostitutes” — which had not figured in my life’s ambitions,’ he laughs.
Dr Consolation’s public declaration about contraception was all of the extra perplexing as a result of he’d been solely silent on the matter of the birds and the bees along with his personal son.
‘Earlier than I went to Highgate, aged 13, we bought a letter from the pinnacle saying he hoped we might arrive having been instructed the small print of ‘private hygiene’, —– because it was described then —– however there was by no means a dialog with my Dad.
‘Most fathers draw back from it — I’ve actually by no means mentioned it with my very own two sons — and my dad was no exception. The humorous factor is, in most methods he was a really typical man.’
He was, it appears, each progressive and conservative; a curious mixture of reticence and outspokenness: though born in 1920 he got here to epitomise the liberalism of the Sixties, however alongside this sat the restraint of an earlier period.
I ponder what Dr Consolation, who died in 2000, aged 80, having been confined to a wheelchair by a critical stroke 9 years earlier, would have fabricated from at this time’s explosion of web porn and its prepared accessibility, even to youngsters.
And regardless of his personal permissiveness, would the throw-away casualness of at this time’s hook-ups have disconcerted him?
‘He was an ideal believer that intercourse had its place as a part of a caring relationship; not as one thing purely mechanical. He felt that folks’s emotions shouldn’t be exploited,’ says Nick.
‘I believe he could be dissatisfied by the expansion of unfeeling intercourse. He would have been unhappy that younger folks really feel pressured to have intercourse sooner than ever.
‘He felt it was one thing you’d come to in your individual time and in your individual manner. He welcomed the truth that extra folks have been having fun with it and he needed them to be correctly educated about it.
‘However I do not suppose he would have been glad about very younger youngsters being instructed an excessive amount of about it both.
‘He’d be nervous concerning the ubiquity of web porn; that it would attain individuals who may very well be broken by it.’
Dr Consolation, additionally a fervent advocate of free speech, would have been ‘exasperated’ by the present stifling of educational debate on transgender points.
‘He believed passionately in open debate, that folks have been entitled to specific their opinions even when they have been at odds along with his personal.’
When The Pleasure Of Intercourse was first printed Nick, then 26, was married to his first spouse Deborah — twice divorced, he married Jeanette in 2014 — and dealing in Sheffield because the municipal correspondent of one of many metropolis’s each day papers.
He claims to have been comparatively untouched by the preliminary brouhaha surrounding the e book, as a result of it was launched first in America, not least to spare his mom’s emotions: ‘Dad did not wish to upset her any greater than she had been. She’d needed to put up with sufficient.’
On the time, too, there was a prohibition on docs promoting, and fearful that the e book would possibly infringe this — and that he may very well be struck off the medical register — Dr Consolation forged himself as its editor. (In actuality, after all, he wrote it.)
The way to illustrate it with out resorting to ‘soiled photos’ that will inflame the censors, was additionally problematic.
The famously hirsute and impressively versatile duo within the drawings have been husband and spouse Charles and Edeltraud Raymond.
Nick Consolation, pictured at 19 along with his father Dr Consolation and mom Ruth in 1966, in Cambridge
Bearded Charles, one of many artists on the e book (he often painted flowers), and German-born Edeltraud, volunteered ‘and he or she bought him by way of the positions with Teutonic effectivity’, says Nick.
The intercourse was not simulated, however actual, he says. I comment that they will need to have been exhausted, rattling by way of all of it at a tempo as a result of the garret through which the photographs have been taken, because of the miners’ strike, was freezing chilly.
A part of the illustrations’ enchantment, after all, lies within the unfeigned affection — truly the love — the drawings emanate. And this real feeling can by no means be replicated in at this time’s soulless porn movies.
‘The generations who realized from ‘Pleasure’ owe Charles and Edeltraud quite a bit,’ agrees Nick.
‘Their tenderness and lack of prurience was precisely what Dad was aiming for.’
Was Nick amongst those that used the handbook to boost his personal intercourse life?
‘Nicely I learn it, after all,’ he says, ‘and there will need to have been issues that caught my creativeness however I did not mannequin my very own behaviour on it. I suppose it was helpful.’
He concedes, too, that he was gently joshed as phrase unfold about his father’s handbook and by the mid-Nineteen Seventies — by then working for a nationwide, London-based broadsheet — he grew to become its unofficial porn correspondent.
‘I used to be despatched to interview the porn star Mary Millington in North London and he or she was sitting within the freezing chilly ingesting Lemsip out of a Basil Brush mug with a scorching water bottle on her lap.
‘I could not have considered something much less horny.
‘And I lined a very salacious porn trial in Birmingham which was large enjoyable.
‘When the plot of one of many movies was being recounted, the decide bought so scorching he needed to take away his wig.’
Now Nick and Jeanette dwell in a sprawling Victorian semi in South London, not removed from the church he attends and close to his daughter and granddaughters, aged 13 and ten, who’ve solely the very vaguest notions of what their great-grandfather bought as much as.
After Dr Consolation and Jane’s foray into free love in California, they returned to their roots to dwell quietly within the lee of a windmill in Cranbrook, Kent.
Jane died 5 years earlier than Alex had his stroke; he had an amicable rapprochement with Ruth and Nick would typically be part of each his dad and mom for Christmas lunches.
Was The Pleasure Of Intercourse a pressure for good, I ask him. ‘Dad would have regarded its values as lasting ones,’ he says.
And they’re. On the coronary heart of the handbook that shocked the world so profoundly half a century in the past, is the enduring fact that intercourse, intimacy and eroticism are at their most intense when they’re accompanied by love.
As we speak, in a world of ubiquitous, empty porn and informal, loveless couplings, maybe we’d like the Pleasure of Intercourse greater than ever.
Copy! A Life In Print, Parliament And Far Flung Locations by Nicholas Consolation is on the market on Amazon.