In the 1990s I spent quite a bit of time in Iran, exploring for gold and copper. Fun times. It’s a beautiful country and we saw a lot of it, mainly in the Turkic north which stretches from the capital, Tehran, up to the borders with Azerbaijan and Turkey. We worked with a small team of Iranian geologists. One of the guys, a key member of the team who I’ll call Bob, was newly married. I’d met his wife in Tehran. A very pretty woman, she was quite religious, as was he, hence in true Islamic fashion, their hospitality to visitors such as me was overwhelming.
I worked with Bob on and off for a couple of years. He acted as guide, project geologist, translator, gofer – whatever was needed. One day, looking very nervous, he asked to speak to me in private. Something was obviously up.
Bob: Mr. Ralph. You know I’m married?
Me: Yes. How is married life? Good?
Bob. My wife and I want to make a baby.
Me: Right.
Bob: But not straight away. First we want to practice. People in your country practice a lot don’t they?
Me: Why yes Bob, they do. It’s called shagging (I didn’t actually say that, but hey.)
Bob: I’ve heard that there are books in the West with instructions on how to er… practice?
Me: Yes. That’s true. We call them..er.. sex manuals.
Fuck me, I thought. He wants me to buy him a sex manual. I can only imagine how bad, or entirely absent, sex education must be in much of Iran so it kind of made sense, and bloody hell, was he ever ballsy to ask me. Sure enough, he gave me money to buy him one next time I was back in the UK.
The problem was, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how I was going to smuggle it in to Iran. Their overly diligent customs officers went through our bags every time we came in or left the country, looking for satanic news magazines, booze or western music CDs. But Bob had evidently thought this through. Turns out Iran has a well-established system of anonymous post office boxes for the receipt of contraband from the west. I was given a piece of paper with a Tehran PO Box address and a fake name written on it. The PO Box address was used by a number of people, and I’m betting somebody, somewhere, was being bribed to let packages addressed to it pass unopened.
So then I had to find something tasteful enough for a devout Muslim couple that would teach them the basics of a quick 69 or the Asian Cowgirl. I was visiting my cousin in Leeds, who was then in her early twenties, so I recruited her to help me solve “the problem”; find a sex manual that was refined and tasteful enough to appeal to a broad-minded Islamic woman, but also broad-ranging enough that there’d be lots of fun things for Bob and Bobette to practice to their hearts’ content.
Half an hour with her in a large local bookshop and we found something she thought would work. (I have to admit it was a bit strange prowling the sexual self-help shelves with a close female blood relative, but needs must.) The old 1970s Joy of Sex manual, the one with the line drawings of the really hairy couple, wasn’t going to cut it but we eventually found a modern, large-format paperback. It had lots of nice colour photos, but not too graphic, lots of positions and various chapters each covering different aspects of sexual techniques. I paid my/his money, and we left clutching the prize.
A week or two later, I stuck it in a padded envelope, addressed to Mr. Anonymous at the PO Box in Tehran and mailed it off. A year or so later I caught up with Bob again who subtly let me know that my gift had arrived undetected, unscathed, and uncensored. He and his wife still had no kids but they were definitely practicing. Job done.