The media column: Absolutely shocking (and that's just the writing)

In "a dimly lit basement" only "a stone's throw from the British Museum and the Royal Opera House", as unwitting passers-by went about their business only a few feet away, "a scene redolent of ancient Rome was unfolding". This, in summary (but with the real quotes), was the gist of the funniest piece of journalism that I have read so far this year. On the Tube last Friday, I laughed so loudly that people were looking at me.

Had it been 1 April and not 10 May, I might have decided that the front-page splash in the London Evening Standard, headlined, "City wine bar sex parties exposed", was a hoax, a pastiche on press reporting of transgressive sex – or, indeed, of any sex. It would take quite some thrower to be able to hit both the British Museum and the Opera House from the same basement, and for a reporter to compare something to ancient Rome, as though he had been there, is to invite scepticism. Classicists will have read on, expecting an exposé of the way in which the rather prudish Romans used to entertain one another by reciting their own interminable poems.

No poems! Back to the basement. Two Standard reporters, Keith Dovkants and Harriet Arkell, had made internet contact with a swingers' club and – heavily disguised as trendy young professionals – had gone along to the subterranean rendezvous in a Holborn wine bar. The double-page spread on pages six and seven recounted how polite conversation had given way to "a turmoil of writhing bodies".

Why, though, were Clark Kent and Lois Lane there at all? Why all the fuss? Well, apparently, swinging is rife. It reflects what the writers described as "the middle class's growing preoccupation with sex with strangers". A week earlier, The Sunday Times News Review had a three-page exposé of swingers' clubs in Paris, blaming such decadence – almost entirely – for the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen. You know, like in Cabaret. There are no actual statistics, but you just know that it's on the up.

What was funny wasn't just the earnest assurance that it was the sheer importance of the story that had sent the reporters to the orgy. No, what had me howling was the description of the sex. Newspapers just cannot do sex, and journalists are forced to write about it as though they were visiting aliens. A series of activities with which most of us are fairly familiar metamorphose in print into improbable weirdness.

So, Harriet and Keith have joined Julian and Sophie in the still "dimly lit basement". Things begin to get interesting. "Suddenly, couples and small groups became engrossed in each other. In a corner a woman in black lace underwear performed a sex act on a man as other men waited in a queue behind him."

"Performed a sex act on a man..."? You can perform Chopin's Second Piano Concerto on a baby grand, and everybody knows what's what, but what does performing a sex act on someone mean? Tickling his scrotum with the nib of a Biro? No, that wouldn't explain the queue. And in what sense is it a "performance"?

It is, of course, police language, just like, "I was proceeding in a northerly direction..." It has its roots in court reporting, which used to be the only way the old middle classes could read about sex. We understand that it probably means oral sex, but any young ladies getting hold of the paper would be protected from that appalling reality.

The rest is sub-Robbins. In the Holborn bar, two women are "cavorting together on a chair", and soon the room is "a turmoil of heaving bodies". Heaving and cavorting! Don't we all like a bit of a cavort, followed by some heaving? Or maybe just watching. Like the "executive from the Telegraph newspaper group" spotted by the reporters, who was by no means the only voyeur present that night.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com