LET'S GET PHYSICAL

Jilly Cooper said she thinks running has taken the place of more intimate activities. Helen Coffey asks if she’s right and whether exercise is really to blame for our loss of libido

- Helen Coffey

As I stood cheering on some friends while they completed a half marathon race at the weekend, I pondered aloud whether I should join a running club.

Watching the sheer range of athletic bodies crossing the finish line, I was thinking less about shaving time off my 5km PB and more about potential trysts. “Some of them must be single?” I commented. “One minute you’re working up a sweat together, and the next you’re, well, working up a sweat together...”

It was as though I was voicing the plot of an as-yet-unwritten raunchy new Jilly Cooper novel – one titled RUNNERS! or STRIDERS! or some such. Except these days, the Dame of Smut thinks we’re focusing a bit too much on pounding pavements and not enough on pounding, er, other things, according to a recent interview.

The beloved author of multiple racy novels, Cooper has plenty to say on the subject of sex (“Life is quite short of joy and I think sex is heaven,” she said during a BBC documentary. “I think one should have as much as you can, and in books I think you should have quite a lot, too”). But if anything, she argues, the modernday obsession with exercise is responsible for waning libidos.

Speaking just before her 1988 book Rivals hits the small screen on Disney+, its adaptation featuring an all-star cast including David Tennant and Aidan Turner, Cooper claimed that times have changed since she wrote the second bonkbuster in her Rutshire Chronicles series.

She believes that, in contrast to the world of upper-class, horseowning, countryside-dwelling, riding-crop-wielding Brits in which her novels are set – where sex is practically a national sport – we’re all “at it” much less nowadays. Furthermore, Cooper has come to the conclusion that lots of people are, quite literally, running away from physical intimacy.