It fries the brain and knocks the libido off-kilter, simplifying - purifying, in a way - the complexities of desire and gender. But at the other end of the process, those producing dodgy films and videos have, ever since sex on screen could be beamed into every home, been earning fortunes. So perhaps Tony Blair's old pal Silvio Berlusconi was on to something when earlier in the week his government passed a bill to tax the sex industry. Like smoking, porn is bad for the consumer and, like the oil business, a few firms make absurd profits, so why not let the taxman do what the censor cannot?Italy's legislators have a good record for thinking the unthinkable - this year's decision by Turin to fine dog-owners €500 if they fail to exercise their animals three times a day was an excellent idea, as was Rome's outright ban of goldfish bowls. Donaldson, who died earlier in the year, was for much of his life in thrall to an intense pornographic ideal, finding it difficult to attain and impossible to sustain.
His friend Julian Mitchell, recalling a trip to Paris in which, as teenagers, they had lost their virginities to prostitutes, wrote that "it wasn't the tart but the pornography that did him in, he used to say." Few are as honest about their sex lives as Donaldson was, but only the most grievously addled old diddler would argue that regular exposure to porn has no effect on a person's ability to deal with everyday life. Embarking upon a biography of the brilliant and strange writer Willie Donaldson, I have been spending an unhealthy amount of time contemplating pornography. You And Yours, in which weird shouty people daily dredge up idiotic health scare stories and "meither" harmless confidence tricksters, achieves the unlikely one-two of being both tedious and repulsive. Aileen Mary Henderson, archaeologist: born London 29 July 1907; Special Lecturer in Archaeology, University College of the South West (Exeter University from 1955), then Lecturer and Senior Lecturer 1947-72; married 1933 Cyril Fox (Kt 1935, died 1967; three sons); died Exeter 21 November 2005. Aileen Fox was almost the last surviving member of the generation of archaeologists that included the prehistorians Stuart Piggott and Christopher Hawkes, and the Roman scholar Ian Richmond. In her roles as excavator, teacher and field recorder she was the founder of modern archaeology in south-west England. She was born Aileen Mary Henderson into comfortable middle-class circumstances. Her grandfather had been the first manager in Shanghai of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.
Her childhood, spent in London and Surrey, is described in her autobiography Aileen: a pioneering archaeologist (2000), a carefully observed social history describing a world of nannies, the Serpentine, Barkers and dancing lessons. Later she said that her teenage observation of the idleness and triviality of the leisured Edwardian woman's life bred in her a determination to do something more challenging.After Cambridge, where she read English at Newnham, she thought it would be interesting to go on an excavation, so sought advice from Jocelyn Toynbee, the scholar of Roman art, who arranged for her to take part in the excavations at the Roman site of Richborough in Kent. Audio warnings could include loud recordings of "The Laughing Policeman", by the great Charles Penrose.No, don't mention it, glad to be of help. Although I'm a little concerned about how we'll fill the yawning conversational gap now that's sorted. We've already lost hunting, David Blunkett, and the thrilling Tory leadership race Ah, well, back to bird flu and binge drinking, I suppose.. By making them visible, in a friendly, rather than threatening, way. Contained, for example, within large caricature figures of a saluting policeman, or Mr Darling, or, perhaps, Herr Schumacher, pointing a mock Pentax.