Especially if the meeting is a fraction longer than one of those purse-lipped anal kisses

Especially if the meeting is a fraction longer than one of those purse-lipped anal kisses (you know, mouth looks like a sphincter) beloved of gay comedians and maiden aunts. The sex police at Associated Newspapers have clearly been foaming at their jealous little mouths with the red-blooded obscenity of it all.But why is mouth-on-mouth action considered outr?n an age in which extreme donkey sex is three clicks away on the web? We’ve been kissing for thousands of years and most anthropologists think it stems from Mrs Caveman’s habit of dribbling masticated food into her offspring’s mouths like starlings. In my childhood and early teens it was certainly the case that many family friends and relatives would plant a mouth kiss, because I vividly remember the sly hand movement used to wipe away any trace of vile, adult spittle. But then, sometime in the Eighties, the air kiss sneaked into everyone’s social vocabulary with its sterile “Mwah, mwah” delivered into the void on either side of a person’s cheeks. I suppose that the gesture’s reek of high camp and artifice was ideally suited to an era of power-dressing, cut-throat ambition and social climbing.

Why waste the touchy-feely stuff on friends when there was little enough time to get laid?Corralling off the mouth kiss with sex was also a handy way of making social signals easier to read. If two people kissed on the lips it was immediately assumed they were sleeping together. I recently discovered that a socialite girlfriend who visited me in my first term at Oxford had assumed I was sleeping with everyone in my student digs, girls and boys, because we touched lips In fact, I was still struggling to mislay my virginity. But as the trend for oral froideur reached its zenith with Charles and Di’s infamously glacial botch job at a polo match in 1992, the E-fuelled club scene and the New Age movement were fighting a spirited rearguard action. Friends were emerging as the new family and had more permanence than lovers. You couldn’t fob them off with an air kiss, especially now that this gesture’s inherent vapidity and naffness had been ruthlessly exposed by Absolutely Fabulous.Over the past 10 years I have noticed a steady increase in the number of people who proffer their lips to say hello or bid farewell In my office it is pretty much obligatory. So what could be more emblematic of this new tactility than the sight of Britain’s most ferocious inquisitor planting three hearty kisses on an old friend’s mouth? But the Mail is to be congratulated for alerting us to the dangers of the practice Perils which, of course, form the kernel of its appeal.

The fleeting union of two ultra-sensitive strips of epidermis endings cannot help but create a flash of unaccustomed intimacy.Years ago I planted a chaste kiss on an attached colleague under the mistletoe in a bustling office and was astonished to experience an immediate ripple of high-voltage mutual attraction Utter, glorious nightmare. More recently I employed an assistant whose lips were so plump and perfectly formed that even woman sighed at their touch. Male recipients just looked dazed.Conversely, there are lechers whose trapdoor mouths give way, leaving you teetering on the repellent and salivary abyss. You begin to understand why, in 1562, the burghers of Naples made public kissing punishable by death.I’m just amazed Blair hasn’t thought of it. It’s just the sort of knee-jerk measure he would throw as a sop to hysterical Mail readers: “The Government is introducing a policy of Zero Tolerance on street kissing after rival gangs of luvvies and celebrities ran amok in Notting Hill trying to snog each other’s chums.” This would be particularly dire news for married people. The social kiss is the most fun we can have without committing adultery – but only on very rare occasions. For the most part, it’s like leafing through a Norwegian travel brochure – you satisfy a smidgen of idle curiosity but you wouldn’t want to go there..