Bloody young people

The BBC news website today told me that apparently nearly a third of the under 24s in the UK lost their virginity below the age of consent. Click here for the story. The age of consent in the UK is 16, in case you’ve lost track. It’s now the same whether straight or gay sex.

Am I being a sceptic or a cynic here? We surely all know that anything to do with sex amongst the young is subject to considerable exaggeration. In the older, it’s just subject to moderate exaggeration. It is reminiscent of how any time gentlemen are invited to, ahem, measure “themselves”, the results show their measurements are more than an inch more than when measured by a nurse. I wonder if they were told that the nurse would audit their figures after? To be fair, the unexpected popping up of a stern nurse with a ruler would explain a sudden loss of an inch for most of us.

But I digress.

I suppose I lost my virginity twice and in neither case was the age of consent nearly an issue (ages of consent were 16 and 21 at the time). I didn’t know anybody when I was 16 who anybody believed had actually “been there” with anybody. There was, of course, much laddish pretence otherwise.

How can it be that if youngsters are all frantically shagging each other, they find time to all get such excellent A level grades? I believe that more than a quarter of A level students get a grade A these days. Who could ever have imagined that genetic improvement could be so marked in but one generation?

I got A level grades AAAB when it was hard to get As. It’s all been downhill academically ever since then so I’m protective of it.

Now look here! I can cope with the idea of people being younger than me; I can cope with the idea that people can be cleverer than me and I can even cope with the idea of people getting more sex in their life than me (not hard). But the idea that a big chunk of British society is managing to beat me on all three fronts at the same time is damned unfair.