B*ggering About

The following verse was often quoted by a friend of mine at secondary school, and indeed he would sing it most melodiously to the tune of the Eton Boating Song, a very fine genuine rendering of which can be heard on YouTube.

The sexual urge of the camel
Is greater than anyone thinks;
At the height of the mating season
It tries hard to b*gger the Sphinx.
But the Sphinx's back passage is narrow
And blocked by the sands of the Nile,✝
Which accounts for the hump of the camel
And the Sphinx's inscrutable smile.

✝ So much for the analogy of Sphinx and sphincter.

But we weren't aware that a second verse also existed - Haldane (both father and son) and Huxley were eminent biologists and Joad a well-known philosopher).

Now recent exhaustive researches,
By Haldane and Huxley and Joad,
Have shown that the camel will b*gger
Any beast from a whale to a toad,
Excepting the African hedgehog,
Which Haldane and Huxley have shown
To possess an immunity factor
Which is found in this species alone.

And indeed my father, in mellow mood, would sometimes treat my brother Simon and myself to another verse on a similar theme (in which the Oxonian allusion is said to echo rumours of a sex scandal at Keble College Oxford back in 1913).

Protracted and painful researches
By Darwin and Huxley and Ball
Have conclusively proved that the hedgehog
Can never be b*ggered at all.
And further protracted researches
Have still more conclusively shown
That comparative safety in Keble
Is enjoyed by the hedgehog alone.

Two further contributions were also forthcoming from the USA, which are just asking to be conjoined, Harvard being located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ingenious Yankee professors
At Harvard and Princeton and Yale
Have overcome the problem by shaving
The spines off the hedgehog's tail.
and
The search carries on unabated
As eminent scientists seek
For a creature so small and so nasty
As to baffle the Cambridge technique.

And so we arrive at a final, complete version suitable for almost all occasions!

Not many people realise that the word "bugger" is the echo of an early Christian heresy, (nor that the words "shit" and "science" have a common origin, for that matter), which flourished in many parts of Europe but was savagely repressed by the Roman Catholic church in the Middle Ages. These days it's known as Dualism, and was a valiant attempt to reconcile religious belief with the evil and distress with which life is beset – in fact, it believed that the world in which we live was created not by God but by Satan.

One such sect were the Bogomils, located in Bulgaria and therefore also known as Bulgars. A tenet of their belief was that it was self-evidently wrong to bring children into this vale of woe. But on the other hand, a husband had certain, er, urges that somehow had to be satisfied.

The quicker-witted reader, such as yourself, will immediately get my drift, but to spell it out for the rest, it became common practice for Bulgar couples to use the egestive orifice for recreational purposes rather than the procreative one. Such Bulgarity became in due course known as buggery, at least in the English-speaking world.

Dualism was also known as Manicheanism, Catharism, Albigensianism etc and William became deeply interested in such matters (apart from buggery of course) in later life.