The Irish Club in London has been host to many late-night exuberances down through the years, and this columnist has participated in a few of them. These exhuberances, I should add, were alcoholically rather than sexually fuelled, unlike a few evenings ago, when this venerable Sloane Square institution threw its doors open to the Literary Review's Bad Sex Award.
This award, the dreamchild of Literary Review editor Auberon Waugh (who else?) has been running for a few years now, and its noble aim is to celebrate the daftest sex scene from a novel published in the year under review.
One of the 1997 contenders was Booker winner Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things for this memorable passage: "Her nut-brown breasts (that wouldn't support a toothbrush) against his ebony chest . . . His hands on her haunches (that could support a whole array of toothbrushes) to let her know how much he wanted her . . ."
In hot competition was a passage from Edwina Currie's Leaving Home:
"He broke off, reached into the drawer of the bedside table, found the tiny silver packet and, as she watched, rolled its contents on.
`Oh, Michael, I am on fire for you!'
`Hush, we don't want anyone coming to investigate.'
`I'm OK, honestly. Don't stop.'
`I wasn't intending to. Hold on tight. Here we go.' "
Hard to top, I know, but Nicholas Royle was deemed to be the winner for this masterpiece of erotic observation from The Mat- ter of the Heart:
"Ambrose reached for a condom. Yasmin grinned and writhed on the bed, arching her back, making a noise somewhere between a beached seal and a police siren. Her noises increased in volume until she was producing a throaty ululation."
I couldn't have put it better myself. Incidentally, though Mr Royle sportingly turned up to receive his award (a sculpture featuring a woman, a dog and . . . oh, don't ask), Stephen Fry, who had agreed to present it, was nowhere to be seen. The reason? "He's tied up in Toronto," Mr Waugh solemnly declared.
I see that in Britain Marks and Spencer have appointed a poet to give their staff "an opportunity to learn about the arts while at work".
Peter Sansom, who is based in Huddersfield, is the poet selected for the job, and he'll be giving readings and workshops for the supermarket's 57,000 staff throughout the country. "It will be fun," he says, adding that he's looking forward to penning odes about their various jobs.
He begins his mission in the New Year, with a salary paid through the National Lottery grant that was won by the Poetry Society, who are keen to "encourage the growth of poets in corporate life".
What next? Durcan in Dunne's? Longley in Londis? Milton, thou shoulds't be living at this hour.
LAST week I mentioned the Irish books that have been figuring prominently in those Books of the Year roundups so beloved of the posh English papers. Now the poshest of them all, the Times Literary Supplement, has got in on the act, with paeans of praise by a number of eminent contributors to various Irish books.
I'm pleased to see that among them is a heartfelt endorsement by Graham Swift of The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, by the Irish-American poet and funeral director Thomas Lynch. Swift regards it as "one of the most engaging, instructive, humane and affectionate books I have read this year," and adds: "It has also been beautifully produced by Jonathan Cape." I agree entirely with both of these sentiments - indeed, this marvellous collection of essays is my personal book of the year.
The first volume of Roy Foster's W.B. Yeats: A Life receives three commendations. Frank Kermode thinks it "surely one of the best accounts ever written of a great poet deeply involved in the struggles and controversies of his country at a critical moment in its history"; Paul Muldoon roundly declares it "one of the books of the decade . . . a labour of love that is never remotely laborious"; while Colm Toibin sees it as "a brilliantly clear and meticulous version of the formation of a complex and protean genius".
As I mentioned last week, Terry Eagleton waxed rhapsodic in the Independent about An Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape, published by Cork University Press. Gosh, he must really like this book because here he is in the TLS waxing rhapsodic about it all over again. Indeed, he predicts that geography "now looks set to become the sexiest academic subject of all". Whatever you're having yourself, Terry.
Last, but certainly not least, John Banville's The Untouch- able continues to win plaudits that should cause the Booker bozos to blush at their sin of omission. Indeed, Richard Ford suggests "a very black eye for those challenged sages picking up their per diems as this year's Booker judges". For him Banville's "is an engrossing, exquisitely written and almost bewilderingly smart book . . . the fullest book I've read in a very long time." Edward W. Said merely thinks it "astonishing" and "a comic masterpiece".