NO SEX PLEASE, WE'RE BRITISH.

WHOOPS! My apologies to everyone who read/commented on yesterdays post (Ode to a blogger buddy.) - an oversight on my part, I forgot to add the name of the poet and as such misled people into believing this poem was mine. My sincere apologies again.

There are only one or two things that are guaranteed to put me right off a book and explicit sex is one of them. But just what constitutes explicit sex?

Hmm. Not too sure about that, after all what is explicit to me may not be explicit to the next person. HOWEVER I think we can safely say that what used to be considered explicit would nowadays, generally speaking, not even cause the most delicate of souls to blush.

Take for example perhaps one of the most notorious book of all times - yes, I'm talking LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER which in it's day was considered outrageous and an insult to common decency.

Fifty years ago (today), amid international publicity, the Old Bailey was the venue for a trial that did more to shape 21st-century Britain than hundreds of politicians put together. The case of the Crown versus Penguin Books opened on Friday October the 21st, 1960, when courtroom officials handed copies of perhaps the most notorious novel of the century, DH Lawrence's book Lady Chatterley's Lover, to nine men and three women, and asked them to read it. They were not, however, allowed to take the book out of the jury room. Only if Penguin were acquitted of breaking the Obscene Publication Act would it be legal to distribute it.

Now that public obscenity has become commonplace, it is hard to recapture the atmosphere of a society that saw fit to ban books such as Lady Chatterley's Lover because it was likely to 'deprave and corrupt' it's readers.

On November the 2nd, after just three hours deliberation, thee jury acquitted Penguin Books of all charges (and) almost immediately the book became a best seller.

 The end of the Chatterley ban was an enormously symbolic moment, representing the end of an era in which the state had regulated private morality as well as public behaviour. Other obscenity cases followed in the next two decades, but they all tended to have the same result: a triumph for liberation, a defeat for censorship. - Dominic Sandbrook, The Daily telegraph. (click HERE for full article).

So why this article?  Like the journalist who wrote the piece I have also often wondered if anything is too obscene any more. Your opinions please.

You may be interested to know that a book by C.H. Rolph, THE TRIAL OF LADY CHATTERLEY, detailing the trial is available.