An Evening in Soho. Part 1.

I wish to start this tale by way of a disclaimer and an apology, I’m well aware that the setting and subject matter here may be slightly unorthodox to some of you, but let me assure you it is merely by habit that my friend and I happened to be in such an establishment and not due to any kind of deviant motivation. It is just something we do sometimes after our traditional drink in the Montatgu Pike on Charing Cross Road.

To further reassure you that we are in no way hackneyed loutish drunks or shifty droopy eyed perverts this was our choice of drink on that evening: my friend (let’s call him IT) was drinking Efes – A Turkish beer which, although being a huge dirty corporation with shares in Coca-Cola in Turkey, is definitely not the yobbo choice of beverage in the UK. I was drinking Old Rosie – a scrumpy cider from Hertfordshire of high alcohol content, uncarbonated and served at room temperature, cloudy and delicious, but again definitely not the choice of the yobbo. 

We visit these shops mainly for the reasons of irony and the hilarity they bring, as will hopefully be evidenced by the following. So anyway if you are of a prim disposition I apologise and you either want to proceed with caution or go about your day with a far more wholesome activity like drinking tea or playing scrabble.

Therefore, on this evening, IT and I finished our drinks at the Montagu Pike and, with our normal processes a tad eschew, but in an orderly fashion, headed towards our Soho Porn shop destination. Although I am not 100% sure on the names of the different establishments, I believe we settled on a different one from our usual – there is usually a lack of attention to detail by this time in the night. Porn shops in the West End are, more often than not, cleverly hidden beneath book shops, but for some reason this one wasn’t, we went in and did our usual thing of wandering around laughing hysterically at some of the ridiculous products and film titles they have on show*.

To further our entertainment on this evening, it just so happened that this shop had a much wider range of sex dolls than we had seen before, we stood in front of a rack of dolls of varied anatomy and form picking out particularly peculiar tenets of some of the products for our amusement. We were just guffawing at the obvious dissonance between the pictures on the front of the boxes and the globular effigies held within when the rather bulbous proprietor of the establishment inserted himself into our dialogue. He was a somewhat unwieldy individual; in fact he looked exactly like Mr Greedy from Roger Hargreaves fame, except with a head balanced rather clumsily on top of the lump at the apex of his torso (it didn’t really fulfil the criteria of being a neck). For some reason he had seen us and with some heroically misguided foresight placed us as customers ripe for a big sale#.

There was no preamble he was straight in there with his sales pitch. ‘Now guys if you want the best it’s got to be this one’, he pointed to one of the larger boxes situated on the floor, ‘I mean these are fine’, a cursory wave over a range of smaller boxes hung on hooks, ‘...but this is the one, it feels just like a real woman’. We found ourselves staring at this sex doll that consisted of a naked female torso with no arms, no legs and no head, just breasts and a...well you know. My reaction was to laugh with moderate hysteria, which is my usual response, whether out of nerves or joy, I’m never quite sure.

In my mind was the instant reality of the ridiculousness of attempting to copulate (if that’s the right word) with this thing, I mean I consider myself a vaguely tragic figure, but I think that drunkenly pushing out a melancholy white love tear into a limbless unspeakable muff simulation, then sliding off with a pathetic thump onto a carpet-less crumb covered plane of loneliness, would be a new level of tragedy I wouldn’t want to conceive could be possible. Secondly presumably you would have to clean the thing and that would be an absurd and laborious experience that no one would want to carry out. Well, I am a romantic and I think a head and some ability for cognition is necessary for romance.

TBC...

* I can’t remember any specific titles we found funny that day but here are some of my favourites:

In Diana Jones and the Temple of Poon
The Bare Bitch Project
Lawrence of a Labia
Big Trouble in Little Vagina
Pokeahotass
Fatal Erection

Edward Penishands
Now this is the purist form of entertainment in my opinion, linguistic heaven – I was never taught any of this during my MA in linguistics and Communication.

#There was a film playing on a small screen in the corner of the room which provides a somewhat absurd context to any situation; it’s quite hard to talk to anyone when over their shoulder you can see something huge pink and long disappearing into something else pink like a flesh explosion to the cacophony of grunts and whimpers, even in a porn shop.