Not long ago a friend of mine ­ a respectable professional middle-aged man

Not long ago, a friend of mine ­ a respectable, professional, middle-aged man ­ had a small run-in with the police He had been out to dinner with a woman friend Wine was drunk, romantic words were spoken. After dinner, they enjoyed some tender moments near the restaurant. One thing had led to another and soon ­ there’s no polite way of putting this ­ they found themselves having a quick knee-trembler up against a parked car.
It was undignified behaviour, of course ­ disgraceful at their age. These were good, solid people, not randy teenagers out on a weekend binge. A responsible citizen was appalled enough to report them to the police. On their way home, they were pulled over and informed by a police officer that a couple fitting their description had been seen committing an act of public indecency.Sensibly, they both denied all knowledge of the incident, and were suitably affronted by the implication that, out for an agreeable dinner at a local bistro, they would behave with crazed sexual incontinence.

Grudgingly, the policeman let them off with a warning.Many people, I suppose, will sympathise with the whistle-blower. London is rough enough already without respectable, professional middle-aged folk falling upon one another on its streets. That sort of thing might have been all right in the silly Sixties but, when the Beatles sang “Why don’t we do it in the road?”, they can hardly have expected their audience still to be following the advice 30 years on.It’s an argument, I suppose, but not one that I have much time for. Inappropriate middle-aged sex may be difficult to defend on aesthetic grounds, being a ludicrous, huffing-and-puffing parody of the stuff we see on our screens.

The mere thought of Bill Clinton with Monica and that cigar may be an embarrassment ­ or Jeffrey Archer, who, according to his alleged lover Sally Farmiloe, was a couple of stone overweight, so that sex “did rather knock the stuffing out of one”.There’s an odd double standard at work here. Society rather approves of the game old actress with her toyboy, while a randy middle-aged male is invariably portrayed as absurd and pathetic.But, hell, there are times when inappropriateness is appropriate. A restless libido is the product of the imagination, of energy and risk-taking. As a general rule, those who go on being interested in sex through their middle years and beyond are likely to be more stimulating company ­ indeed, generally more alive ­ than those who have closed down operations.The problem is, it can all curdle rather alarmingly at a certain point in a man’s life, as the case of the naval architect Dubravko Rajcevic, on trial this week in New York, has confirmed. To the world at large, Rajcevic is the stalker who followed Martina Hingis around the world, sending her flowers, telephoning her and making a nuisance of himself.To Dubravko himself, he is the man Martina once loved and smiled at through the medium of TV cameras.