Dear Eileen: My Husband is Underwhelming in Bed, Should I Attempt to Galvanise his Testicles by Hooking Them up to a Car Battery?

My name is (Fmr) Sister Eileen Kirkup, I am 76 years old and I am a lapsed nun. My hobbies include baking, knitting and sprucing.

This weeks question comes from Tabitha in Muswell Hill, she asks, "Dear Eileen, my husband is underwhelming in bed, should I attempt to galvanise his testicles by hooking them up to a car battery?"

My Child,

Oh, good heavens! No sex, please! I'm a nun, and i'm British! 

I'm just joking with you, my child, I welcome all kinds of questions from my readers, no matter the subject matter! I may be a former nun, but i'm no prude, and no stranger to the crude, and neither is News, News, News, News. Other agony aunts tend to be more reserved, but I like to think NNNN hired me to subvert those expectations in a way. I view myself as a harpsichord among pianos, so to speak, I appear at first to look like a normal agony aunt, but when one attempts to get a tune out of me, one is shocked to hear such an offbeat sound! Besides, I'm actually a very big fan of Banksy, I have some t-shirts with his art, i'm a bit of a rebel, really!

Now, to answer your question/query, I first must tell you of how I became aware of 'such matters' when I was younger. A lot of us first hear about it from friends, or in sexual education class, but my experience was quite different. As you would've probably guessed, my parents were people of faith, deeply respected in their community and in their church. My father, Claus, was instrumental in raising money for the church when an oak tree smashed through the William Morris stained-glass windows in the great storm of 1963. Not only did he stage several wondrous one-man productions of medieval miracle plays, he also memorised the entire Old Testament and walked from Land's End to John O' Groats reciting it, egged on by a loyal crowd of supporters in every village, town, borough and city he passed through. My old man caught pneumonia, sprained his ankle, got bitten by a grass snake and was harassed by a group of rambling Jehovah's witnesses who were also taking the same route. But none of this fazed him, he completed the journey, raised more than enough money to restore the windows, and was even rewarded with a place on the stained-glass window near Saint Paul. 

My mother had the same community-driven spirit, she was also quite the inventor! She invented the organ pipe cleaner which is still used in parishes around the country to this day! The times were changing in the mid-1950s and child welfare laws prohibited small children from climbing into the pipes as this was seen as a risk to their respiratory health, and many people didn't believe their existence was physically possible in the first place, so my dear mother managed to convert an old curtain rail into a large pipe cleaner by wrapping it in llama fur. Sourcing the llamas was not as big a problem as you may have thought. Every year, their village celebrated Whitsun by tying six llamas to a maypole and watching them shuffle round. The first llama to stop and sit down would be the ‘chosen one’, they’d untie it, give it a throne and a sceptre, and if it grunted at an anyone, the unfortunate villager would be slaughtered and fed to the llama. They don’t put the ceremony on anymore, my child, I think it was Thatcher who put an end to it, the killjoy that she was.

Well, one wintry afternoon we were snowed in to our little cottage on the edge of the village. Completely barricaded by snow! I remember my father stooping beside the fireplace, praying for the snow to melt, whilst my mother was busy strapping an old iron to a piece of rope and lowering it onto the snow, hoping it would act as a melting device. Unfortunately it had little to no effect and this greatly dismayed my mother, as she always seemed to prevail against the odds, no matter how hard things got. Clearly mighty mother nature was a step too far even for her. I remember her cussing and swearing about the house, which quite aggravated my father, who was busy trying to figure out what sins he could’ve committed for God to create such misery. He went through a long list of misdemeanors like having a second serving of pudding last Wednesday, accidentally standing on Mrs Prufrock’s lawn after leaving Church, sending his daughter to Catholic school etc.

They then proceeded to have an almighty screaming match for the next 27 minutes and 35 seconds. I evacuated to my special hiding place in the room at the top of the house, behind father's bookshelf filled with dusty, leather-bound bibles. I never did peruse through them, though I did once attempt to open one up but was cruelly bitten by a bug sitting on the frontispiece on Jesus' face. I think it's safe to say, my child, that you won't encounter a speck of dust in my house now. 

When I pressed my ear to the floor to listen for more commotion downstairs I heard only silence, though a deafening one. Making the trek downstairs always felt like walking through a forest near Chernobyl after the reactor exploded, thick, British, repressed, middle-class marital-anger choking you up, rotting your insides, although I think I turned out OK, my child!

I couldn't find Mother or Father anywhere in the house. Usually mother would take a post-screaming match walk down to see the sheep at the bottom of the village, and father would just sleep. I realised I hadn't checked their room, so when I did, I opened the door slowly, peeked my head around, and.. well, my child, they were engaging in what my young mind could only fathom as 'procreation-adjacent Human Play-Doh'. 

I never mentioned it to either of them, one wouldn't. Looking back I do wonder why these conjugal endings to their screaming matches didn't stop the screaming matches happening in the first place, in fact, if anything they became more violent, sharp, biting and vicious. Perhaps the ferocity of their rows directly correlated with their increased mutual enjoyment of love-making, but I really don't know, and, I can't stress this enough, my child, I don't want to think about any of it. So, if you don't mind, I won't offer my opinion with regards to your Husband and whether you should harness an electrical current to stimulate his genitalia. 

I wish you a very merry Christmas!

Yours, 

Eileen