Tales of the City: Thou Shalt Not Get Found Out

A woman called Judith E Brandt has come up with a book of rules and conventions for having an affair. It's called The 50-Mile Rule: Your Guide to Infidelity and Extramarital Etiquette and is rather brilliant, in being ultra-formal about the least formal activity.

Ms Brandt argues that infidelity, if conducted in the right spirit, can be good for a marriage – provided everybody understands (tacitly, implicitly) what's expected of them. I think she's absolutely right, judging by the behaviour of several marriages in my social acquaintance. We fortysomethings are in midlife-crisis hell, where long-married partners (male and female) are straying all over the place without being able to split up, and the only commandment in the bible of human relationships is: Thou Shalt Not Get Found Out. English people seem to be adopting a French aristocratic approach to marriage, divorce and the thing in between called The Affair Everyone Knows About. Wives who no longer want to have sex with their husbands, but don't want their stable home broken up, can indulge (or indeed welcome) their husband's affair. The husband can bask in the reassurance that he's attractive, physically and mentally, to another woman, while exploring his under-used capacity for tenderness with his new lover. She can (depending on circumstances) enjoy the socio-sexual intensity, the heavy-duty rapturous courtship of an affair as long as she can stand it without feeling taken for granted.

The days seem to have gone when a husband, having found a new ladyfriend, feels the need to destroy the whole playhouse of home, wife, children and friends in order to start again. And it works just the same with straying wife and indulgent husband, provided he can stifle the atavistic throb of being labelled a cuckold.

Ms Brandt provides tips for would-be adulterers, especially the one that gives the book its title: "When playing away, play far away. Never conduct an affair within 50 miles of your spouse, and always hunt beyond your social circle". Some of her advice seems very sound ("Avoid uncharacteristic behaviour designed to impress your new lover – taking up new sports, writing poetry etc"; "Keep lies to a minimum. Always give your true whereabouts"). Much of it, though, seems rather brutally macho: Never leave your real name behind you. Never make your lover any promises. Don't leave any clothing behind. Give no gift that can't be "stolen back quickly". If found out, deny everything. Finish it when the woman starts telephoning your home...

Gosh. She makes modern infidelity sound less like a love affair and more like an undercover operation in postwar Berlin, complete with secret identities, private codes and suicide pills. I'm sure she's right to be so ruthlessly efficient, but her approach does nothing for the image of the unfaithful husband. Far from being the romantic hero trapped in a dubious marriage and looking to be saved by an understanding maiden, it makes him seem like a super-efficient time-and-motion manager. And what kind of woman would want to head for a weekend in Venice with someone like that?

The opium of the people? You must be crackers

After reading the exciting news in the weekend papers, I naturally high-tailed it down to my local Marks & Sparks and bulk-bought as many packets of its Savoury Crackers as I could find. As you will know, the venerable crunchy snack has been banned in Singapore, accused of containing "minute traces of morphine". Because the crackers contain poppy seeds, a sheepish M&S man explained, they're bound to have microscopic traces of opiate in them. Even that's too much for the super-strict narcs of Singapore.

Aaaanyway, I spent Saturday afternoon in a trance on the sofa, while scoffing 16 packets of the things, washed down with draughts of Irn-Bru (said to contain a mild narcotic, though detectable only by Scottish people in the early hours) and sprinkled with nutmeg, which (a friend assures me) is stuffed with hallucinogens.

As I lay there, life went all hazy. My vision became blurred. Strange figures passed in and out of the living-room – possibly lascar servants of the wily Orientals who seemed to have taken over my house; possibly just my children tiptoeing past their spaced-out papa. After 300 poppy-seed crackers, I'm telling you, you're in a very altered state, though sadly you're far from stoned, except in your imagination. So I tried crunching up a few packets of crackers in a casserole dish and pestling them into a mound of dust. I rolled the result into a five-skin joint with some Golden Virginia and lit it. It was, like, totally amazing, but it didn't make you terribly high. Dammit, I'm sick of these domestic-drug rumours. After all the Coca-Cola I drank when I heard it contained molecules of cocaine, after the gallons of Night Nurse I consumed because of the rumours of its barbiturate content, I thought I'd discovered the real thing. Now what's all this about Hobnobs being stuffed with crystal meth?

The joy of letters

I wrote an article about The Joy of Sex the other day, and about its multi-talented author, Alex Comfort. I wondered aloud why he insisted on following his name with a couple of letters ("MB, DSc" or "MB, PhD") to show his credentials as a serious physician rather than a connoisseur of bonking methods. I wondered if "MB" was a kosher honorific, and hinted that the good doctor might be a bit fake. Hell ensued. Doctors wrote in, complaining about my stupidity, explaining that "Bachelor of Medicine" obviously mutates into "MB" (duh!) and questioning my sanity.

I raised the matter because I know almost nobody today who shows off the university degrees and name-furniture to which they're entitled. All the "Oxon" and "Cantab" stuff, the subtle gradations of "MPhil" and "DLitt", have gone the same way as addressing letters to "John Smith, Esquire". Should we start using the degree abbreviations again? Would professional relations improve if we started putting "PhD (UCLA)" or "BMus" after peoples' names? Or would it get too cumbersome? I noted that one of my correspondents, a doctor from Brighton, was the proud possessor of "MB, BS, LRCP, MRCS, DObst, RCOG, DCH, FPA Cert, MRCGP, Dip Ven MFFPRCOG" – and those were just the highlights...

Not up to speed

"Disillusionment and ridicule are just some of the experiences and feelings officers get with regard to this vehicle," said the policeman. He was one of the intrepid crimefighters attached to the Royal Botanical Gardens Constabulary in the famous gardens at Kew, west London. The vehicle that's causing the cops such grief is the force's new £13,500 electric police patrol van. It's painted a nice, horticultural green, resembles a souped-up golf buggy, seats four people and glides around the manicured greensward at 10mph. Reports suggest that the dignity of the police has been impugned by jeers that rent the peaceful afternoon during the vehicle's trial run, and the fact that the booing was being done by small boys and OAPs.

You can't have traditional police cars whizzing round the mild pathways of Kew like the credit sequence of The Sweeney, but I can see the policeman's point. There is nothing so inimical to one's self-esteem as to find oneself overtaken, on patrol, by a dozen toddlers on tricycles and micro-scooters, as one cruises grandly past a bed of pelargoniums in search of criminal activity. I think we can agree that the full majesty of the law will not appear to best advantage when pursuing greenhouse robbers at walking speed across the herb garden in its Toytown truck, truncheons at the ready, like a slowed-down version of the Keystone Kops.

But it may represent a small hop forward in community policing. Now the laid-back approach to cannabis is working so well in south London, is it time for the Met to adopt a "slowly-slowly" approach to apprehending bad guys? Rather than all the old Flying Squad heroics, we'd all like to see a nailbiting car chase through Camberwell, between the Yardie in the BMW and the flatfeet doing 10mph in the Sinclair C5...