Five Questions About… Those Two Students Who Fell Asleep Shagging

Before the weekend, a small video clip of two students, asleep but locked together in a shag still – boots and unrolled jeans adorning the hallway, a sort of monument to horniness, like that lad in Pompeii who got eternally locked in mid-wank by a dust cloud – went viral on WhatsApp, where you have almost undoubtedly seen it.

If you haven’t seen it yet: just ask your nearest WhatsApp group, "Has anyone got that shagging clip?" and they will all send it to you. For obvious reasons, we cannot embed the clip of two asleep strangers shagging on here, because come on, but here's a very censored version that sort of gives you the idea:

There's a quiet beauty in this, isn’t there? It’s like a statue, or a wonderful painting: you can see the remnants of horniness around them; evidence of a kind of get-your-clothes-off-now vibrancy that melted near-instantly to deep fatigue. Did anyone get off as a result of this corridor shag?

I’m willing to bet: no. Did anyone wake up with very stiff legs from sleeping catatonic in a squatting position for about four hours on the floor of a hallway? I am willing to bet the top-mounted shagger here is still finding it difficult to walk, four days on, wobbling around still like a hobbled cowboy. Those are just some questions. I have, like, a hundred more.

Here’s the thing: falling asleep shagging is a rare shagging move. If it were a Pokémon card, it would have a small black star in the corner of it, and shiny foil: it can happen, sure, but the frequency of it is statistically very low. Shagging is a fairly high-intensity activity – similar to falling asleep carrying a load of laundry to the washing machine, or during a beginner's badminton class – but it does tend to happen on a bed, which is where you sleep normally.

You can fall asleep shagging on those rare occasions when you initiate a shag when you’re absolutely knackered, and somewhere between the cushioned bed beneath you, the fluttering eye movements you’re doing and the semi-gentle rocking motion, you just sort of detach and fall asleep. This is seen as the shagging equivalent of "an exceedingly negative Yelp review" to the person you’re shagging, but it can be done.

But two people, falling asleep shagging? At more-or-less the same time (think: if you see someone fall asleep under you while you’re shagging them, you’re going to dismount and go to sleep somewhere else: you’re not going to just go "oh, well" and fall asleep on top of them in a squatting position, or beneath them on a cold linoleum floor)? Run the numbers on this and it is as statistically minute as, like, those flowers that only open once every eight-years, or an eclipse. I think for two people to fall asleep locked into one another like this means they will have had to fall asleep – a process that takes a couple of minutes, at the best of times – at more or less the exact same time, i.e. their eyes will have had to grow heavy in tandem, and they both will have resisted their drooping eyelids to stay awake for the same amount of time, then they both will have had to make the semi-conscious decision to give up and embrace sleep at the exact same moment, and then both their bodies will have had to collapse into a dream at the precise same time.

It’s a wonderful example of synchronisation. In a way, it’s possible their souls are perfect ancient matches, atoms of yin and yang that have shuttled around the universe since it first exploded into being, searching for one another, their absolute opposite, their inverse, but also their same, and just happened to find each other within the bodies of two hammered 19-year-olds who still haven’t got over Fresher’s Week yet.

Can’t zoom in on the photo here because again come on, but I’m pretty sure the lad in question is, like… still good to go? Like, he’s still: good to go. And that leads me to one of two conclusions:

• My man is like 19 years old and it is impossible to not be hard at any point when you’re 19 years old, like you are essentially a walking erection for an entire year of your life, which yes is very useful in instances like this when you’re having full sex with another person, but is very awkward and difficult when you’re doing normal stuff like, I don’t know, buying doughnuts from the bread bit at Morrison’s, or comforting your dying nan—
• He is still awake under there and is simply too polite to do anything about it

Normally I would lean fully on the correct answer to the erection conundrum being 1., but for the fact that this short video clip was taken in Britain, where a lot of us are so socially polite and unwilling to cause a disturbance that it’s actively detrimental to ourselves and society as a whole. What I am saying is: if a girl fell asleep on me in a sort of horny knackered squat position and I was still awake, I think I would just sort of… lie there quietly until the sun came up? Just sort of… let her sleep there? I fundamentally wouldn’t want to say anything in case it came out as rude, same way I stay absolutely prim and silent when someone cuts in front of me in a queue. It’s just not the done thing, is it. It’s a bit the same as this shagging. Tough it out, mate, his internal dialogue is saying. Lie in a corridor with your knob fully out and just tough it out.

Presuming they fell asleep together, it is also likely they would wake up together, especially seeing as they both seem so heavily asleep that the motion of sober people taking videos of them locked in an eternal rut doesn’t seem to faze them awake. Which is odd: you know when someone is talking too much in a house you are trying to sleep in (you will get this later in the month when you go home for Christmas, where you have forgotten that for some reason in recent years your mum’s routine has become "wake up at 7AM and just immediately start making phone calls), and you can hear the voice sort of blubbing through the walls to get to you – distant at first, an alien species in whatever dream you’re having – and then you slowly start to come to, the light fades into your eyes behind their lids, and then sounds start coming back to you, sharper, and then with a sound like waves you open your eyes and the world is on fire and— fuck, fuck, someone is asleep on top of me locked in a shag position while other people laugh and video the whole thing. Probably one of the more unideal ways to wake up, this. You’re going to have to help each other stand up, quietly put your respective junks away and try to get on with your day (and the rest of your natural life) without a long glower of shame that makes the back of your neck all hot.

University is fun, isn’t it, because it’s the first time most people drink so much they are sick then go out and drink the next day; it’s the first real time they’ve been able to get into clubs without the high anxiety that they might check your ID; and it’s the first time most people just have a throwaway sexual incident with someone they drank too much Dark Fruits with one night then keep seeing, again and again and again, once a week minimum for the next three years. Ah, yes: there they are behind you in the queue at the campus’s nearest supermarket, buying a big thing of Bounty cookies and a big box of painkillers. Ah: here they are for some reason in the same exam as you, even though you’re on different courses, because of that module change you had to do when you failed English. Oh look: you’re skipping a class to instead play 15 consecutive games of pool in a common area and the only other person there in this cavernous student union is that person you watched half of Pulp Fiction with before doing some hand stuff.

I cannot imagine what these two, who have gone viral for being Britain’s Sleepiest Shaggers, are going to do after this. Is it a life of avoiding each other’s eye contact at union night after union night until one of them has to go and have an emergency study abroad? Or, conversely, will it go the other way and they’ll be bound together by this trauma forever, and end up marrying each other a year after graduating like those weird couples who meet in Fresher’s Week and just never ever have sex with anyone else? Could flip a coin on this, truly. Could go either way.

Not really, no. It fucking owns. Shine on, you tired horny diamonds. You will shag forever in eternity, amen.

@joelgolby