GIVE ME A BREAK:I'M A RUGBY VIRGIN. Or at least I was until Saturday when – thanks to a free ticket – I presented myself at Jones's Road fully expecting to be deflowered. After all, what is sexier than rugby? I'd never have a better adrenalin rush this century. That's what I was told, anyway.
So on Friday night, as I was preparing for bed in anticipation of my first and last rugby experience of Ireland V England in Croke Park (rugby will next year return to that bedpan-style stadium called Aviva) I was flicking around the TV channels and stumbled upon RTÉ1 where Pat Kenny on The Late Late Showwas presenting a sparkling clear-plastic vagina in a seriously embarrassed manner.
Then an American gynaecologist called Dr Matlock appeared and announced- with showmanship and humour – that he had discovered a way to inject the G-spot (located halfway between this and that in the average vagina) with collagen, a treatment he calls the G-shot. Women who have had the G-shot have orgasms while riding bicycles and even driving cars. “Could be inconvenient,” Pat commented.
I'm thinking, damn the inconvenience, where do I get one? G-spot is a concept that I always assumed to be fictional. After all, if God was a woman she would not have placed the clitoris outside the vagina. (I reckon I can use the C-word now that the V-word has been used by Pat on The Late Late.) Then I heard the price. €1,400 per G-shot. And one G-shot lasts four months. If you get the taste for it, that's €4,200 per year.
Pat said something to the effect of, sounds expensive but now that we’re all on a budget and staying in is the new going out this might be a bargain.
Not on my salary, Pat.
The Late Late Showhost did his embarrassed Irish Ken (as opposed to Barbie) straightman act as Dr Matlock sold his G-shot (patent pending; off-brand use of collagen involved, but that's okay Matlock told us . . . hmmm).
Two audience members, both female, said they'd had the treatment but neither gave a convincing argument. I was hoping to see a virtual orgasm in an I'll-have-what-she's-having, When Harry Met Sallysort of way. Didn't happen. One of the women was stony-faced and the other said she was waiting for her husband to return from Tokyo so she could see if her freshly injected G-spot was of any use. She offered to try it out with Pat backstage.
Silly me, out of journalistic interest, I rang the number on the gshot.ie website and was told “Sorry, your number cannot be taken at this time”. Fair enough. I didn’t want my number to be taken anyway.
It's not my sex life, but The Late Late Showthat worries me. The last item was a psychic who had dead people speaking to him and asking him to deliver messages on their behalf. Watching The Late Latewas like going backwards in time, far earlier than the day when Gay Byrne stirred the nation with lesbian nuns at a time when that seemed revolutionary.
Last Friday night was more like the Kansas fairgrounds of the early 1900s where 20 brands of snake oil were on offer. I thought, okay, things are bad, but do we need vaginal injections and psychics to give us hope?
AND SO TO RUGBY – the R-shot. Testosterone-fuelled war. Man against man. There was a lot of hope there on Saturday. We needed a lift and were hoping for something to celebrate even though we dared not hope.
If there was ever a mass of 80,000 people wanting to be lifted out of reality, then the crowd at Croke Park was it. All the Irish wanted something to cheer for, but many of hoardings on the stands were empty even though they had been paid for in advance, rumour had it, by financial institutions that asked for their names to be taken down because they didn’t want their brands seen in public, considering the current controversies. Whether this was true, I can’t say, just as I don’t know if the G-spot truly exists.
But, darn it, I found the R-shot - but it didn't last. My inner rugby virgin roused to the beating drums and cheered at the appearance of the Irish team. It was primeval – Braveheartwithout the horses and make-up but with a lot of guys better looking than Mel Gibson . . . And when the game started, I saw these shaven-headed guys locked in a scrum that seemed to me like thousands of sperm competing to penetrate an egg.
At half-time, I expressed this view to a friend, who said. “Yea, that’s a good analogy.” Unfortunately for me, a first-time rugby virgin, it wasn’t a great game.
The little earpiece they gave me so that I could hear the referee’s every word made it a bit more exciting, but even I could see that deliverance and redemption would not happen for Ireland. We won, but by only one point and even then, because the English team was so undisciplined.
Oh my. An Irish win couldn’t give us the R-shot we craved. And we can’t afford the G-shot. Where now for the feel-good factor?
