For some reason this story from almost a year ago appeared on the BBC News website today as one of the most e-mailed stories of the day.

It is all about the stress involved in public speaking and whether sex can help. It boils down to a psychologist at the University of Paisley doing some experiments and concluding that having sex improves your confidence in the stressful situation of public speaking. The counter-argument was provided by a kill-joy psychologist at the University of York who said:

You are probably better off thinking about what you are going to say, and preparing thoroughly, rather than having sex the previous night.

I wonder which university had the longer queues in the summer?

It really is worth reading the whole story because of the mind-boggling implications of what was involved in the research. A group of subjects kept detailed diaries of all their sexual activity – exactly what they did and whether anyone else was involved – for a fortnight. During that time they were given various tests involving public speaking and doing mental maths aloud. Their performance (at speaking) and stress levels were recorded and correlated to their sexual activity.

The conclusion was that sex helped the public speaking – but only penetrative sex. Apparently masturbation doesn’t help at all, which implies that these diaries which the subjects were keeping were brutally honest… as far as I know auto-asphyxiation involving oranges didn’t crop up, so we will never know if Stephen Milligan‘s antics were purely for pleasure or to improve the quality of his parliamentary speeches.

I can’t help thinking that the psychologists at the University of Paisley must have heard the revelations about John Prescott’s serial shagging this year and then rushed off to shred all their research notes.