Five Questions for… the Couple Who Got Slapped for Shagging in a Park in Leeds

Summer is: rubbing a Solero across your forehead and down the hollow of your chest. Summer is: the faint sound of your shorts tearing away from your skin as you stand. Summer: the trickle of sweat from the nape of your knee down to your ankle.

Or: summer is using a violent motion with every limb of your body to furiously throw your duvet into the air. Summer is not sleeping a wink and summer is legitimately not being bothered about eating dinner. Summer, very crucially, is shagging so hard it is illegal:

From the Metro:

And:

And:

Yes, I have some questions:

I'm thinking about what it would take to get me to stop shagging (once I've started shagging), and yes, this is right up there. I think: I think that would stop me from shagging. If I’m honest, as a nervous shagger, I know that if I heard a tut within 500 yards of the locus of my shagging I would stop shagging and probably never shag again, so it’s hard for me to get exactly into the mindset of the two drunk shaggers in Leeds, shagging through a slap, shagging through a mob attack.

However: I think if someone came up to me and hit me so hard I disengaged from the shag I was participating in – slapped so hard I undocked – I think I would probably, at that moment, gain perspective on my shagging, interrogate whether I should be shagging, here, within slapping distance of a baying crowd, maybe think about taking it home, if nothing else shag behind a bush or copse of trees, somewhere with (even if it's imperfect) a little cover.

The Leeds Park Shaggers did not do that. What else could they shag through? Gunfire? A swarm of wasps? What if someone ran them over with a light-to-medium heavy car? Think about them next time you shag. "How determined am I, right now, to nut?" you must ask yourself. If you wouldn’t take a public attack from a mob to get an orgasm, then I’m not sure you deserve one in the first place.

If we are to posit that the Leeds Park Shaggers are heroes – that they are Legends and everyone who grassed on them is a Bastard – then truly we have to hand it to them, not for shagging in a park beneath the fire-hot heat of the sun, but for shagging at all in these interminable summer months. Sorry, but beds right now are for tossing sleeplessly around on and occasionally melting a single ice cube over your nude midriff about, not shagging. This goes for other surfaces, too. Have you sat on a sofa, lately? You stick to it. Have you been in a kitchen? It’s just where all the flies are. There is no way to be comfortable right now, and there hasn’t been for months. And yet you are expected to somehow shag through that? To conclusion? Without a paddling pool-like slick of sweat forming between your two pulsing bodies? Without your underwear rolling off into a weird damp knot as you peel them off? Without a single shag-generated bead of sweat, dripping slowly down, out of your forehead, along your eyebrows, teetering – just a moment, back-and-forth-and-back-and-forth – on the tip of your nose before falling, perfect arc, bloop, right into the face of your lover? No, no thank you, absolutely not. I’m putting my dick in the freezer until October at the earliest and you all should be, too. The Leeds Shaggers should be knighted by the Queen just for enduring through all that to get a jizz off.

As an extension of the "Big Dick Energy" chat we all had last month, and at the intersection of Scottish Twitter, it has become clear this month that the world is split into two distinct character types – Shaggers, who shag, and Wee Boys, who don’t – and if ever you needed a clearer example of that, watch this video back. The Shaggers, here, are demonstrated by the couple shagging in the middle of the park in broad daylight; the Wee Boys, though technically performing to the letter of the law, are those repeatedly calling the police on them in the background.

Like: I understand shagging near cricket-playing children is a sex offence, and I'm not advocating it whatsoever. But also, there don't appear to be any children there. It looks like the parents present, standing far enough away from the couple that they have to zoom in to their phone's absolute limit just to make out the blurry shagging figures, have removed the children from the situation. Yes, kids should absolutely not be exposed to fevered public rutting. But also… who wants to ruin a lovely sunny day by timing to the exact minute how long it's been since you last called the police? Wee Boys do, that’s who. Have an ice cream and calm down, imo. Have a shag! Have a shag and calm down.

As per the video, the Leeds Park Shaggers had already shagged once, and then, as muttered in the background, "they're now at it again". Again, this is pretty enormous behaviour: shagging once so hard a crowd of distant angry parents call the police about it is pretty massive, but finishing up? Enjoying a refractory period in the calm of the sun? Going back for seconds of your dinner? Humungous. Gigantic. Huge.

This is seasonal stuff, and that's what makes me concerned. Nobody shags in the middle of a park or on a gravestone or anything in November, because of the drizzle and the wind and the three-to-four hours of blue-tinged daylight. Nobody does it in December, or January, because of the sheer amount of Quality St, plus the frost. Shagging in parks is a British summertime tradition, and I worry what will become of us if this heatwave never breaks: yellow-white light baking us until the middle of October, the grass singed into the soil, the hosepipes banned, the trees dying, the Cornettos all eaten, the lager tops all consumed, the productivity at an all-time low: and there, in the middle of every patch of grass and park in Britain, hundreds upon thousands of us, in configurations of twos, and threes, and fours and fives and ones, all of us, shagging to death beneath the glare of the sun. Is this the future you want? Because that's what we're going to have. Look at those Leeds Park Shaggers: look at them, really look at them. They’re you, they are. They are you, and me. They are all of us, just a few months ahead of the curve. The only thing that divides us is three pints of cider and two large wines. There, you must say, staring upon the L.P.S., dialling slowly the number for the police, there – but for the grace of God, and for a bottomless prosecco brunch where I forgot to eat anything sturdy – go I.

@joelgolby