But their medicine men, such as Pythagoras and Galen, thought that there was only so much of the stuff around, so it was best to look after it. The gods of the field incline with the solitaries of the study. Peruvian soccer fans still blame their 1982 World Cup loss to Poland on those players who broke the ban on pre-match sex. For Hinduism, also the sexiest of religions, agrees with Galen that semen is the essence of life. Happily, the players' regular hashish consumption may ease this particular pain.
Celibacy can be just misery.
Deprived of dishy Fatio, who sensibly refused to move to Cambridge, Newton lost his early creativity. As Master of the Royal Mint, he displayed a rather anal concern with guarding the nation's currency and prosecuted counterfeiters with unwonted savagery. But Gandhi showed all the manipulativeness of a Middle Temple lawyer in using celibacy as a way of testing himself and of teasing the teenage girls, whom he alternately slept with and dispatched back to the village. For the Mahatma, sex meant always having to say sorry. One memory haunted him - that of seizing a brief session with his wife and thereby missing the death of his terminally ill father.