Look, I was bored, OK? I was just tootling around the internet. Wandering about in the way people used to stroll around the village in the evening – checking stuff out, seeing how everyone’s getting on. It was almost as though I was admiring someone’s clematis or checking out the functionality of the village water pump, when I came across youporn.com.

For those who haven’t immediately guessed – or perhaps don’t want to – youporn is like YouTube, but with sex instead of “amusing” footage of cats. In a nutshell, it’s where normal people post footage of themselves having sex. It’s couples in Brazil mucking around on the sofa; wobbly Russians having “special snuggles” in the kitchen; three people in Italy not realising that their framing is hopelessly out, and committing to cyberspace the tops of their heads, engaged in who knows what. It’s enthusiastic, shambolic and real – a bit like an erotic Why Don’t You?, but without so many recipes for Coke floats.

Of course, it’s not as if it’s previously been difficult to get hold of porn on the net. There are an estimated 4.2 million such sites, generating more than £12 billion a year. If internet porn were a country, it would be as wealthy as Ghana – though perhaps with not such a flourishing industry in gold and manganese. And maybe with fewer clothing shops. As the saying goes: “The internet is 90 per cent pornography, 10 per cent pornography.” Anything you could possibly wish to see is out there.

There is, however, one kind of porn that you really don’t get to see, and certainly can’t buy in Ann Summers. Because while all the bondage DVDs cost just £14.99, and are available at the click of a button, before youporn, what was really quite difficult to find was two people who loved each other – or, at the very least, actually wanted to have sex with each other – having a shag.

I don’t think I’m deludedly optimistic. Not unless it’s about my chances of being able to jump off a swing while drunk anyway. But I would estimate that the majority of sex that happens in the world every day is probably between two normal people, who are, in all likelihood, tolerably keen about each other. If, however, you were an alien trying to find out what human sex and desire is from TV, movies or porn, you would conclude that, in the case of TV, it was about bawdy 18th-century prostitutes being done in an alley by soldiers. Movie sex seems incredibly driven and serious – a bit like two business rivals playing a high-stakes game of squash, but with lingerie. Porn, meanwhile, looks like shop-window dummies energetically being made to do rude things by teenagers.

And, of course, all of this is being observed by aliens, keen to learn about human sex and desire. The aliens are our children, our teenagers and, often, we adults, who need to learn about sex from somewhere. And let’s face it, they generally learn about it – about how to actually do it, and what you’re supposed to say, and what kind of things everyone else is doing, and how much pubic hair you’re supposed to have while you’re doing it – from one of those three sources. My formative sexual influence was, as I’ve mentioned here before, the character based on a young Cynthia Payne being molested by a naughty uncle in Wish You Were Here. From that scene, I concluded that I could conjoin only with blood relatives, needed to chew gum for the duration and would, later, have to become a celebrated suburban prostitute. It’s all been quite doable – but, looking back, I would have liked a few more options.

This is why I like youporn. I think it’s a good role model for the sexually naive. Most porn is junk sex, made on an industrial scale, in porn factories. What I think we all need is ethical, homemade, organic porn. Real porn. Slow porn. The kind of porn Jamie Oliver would make a programme about.

So many of the things that I’ve seen on youporn are things that I’ve never seen in pornography before. Admittedly, some of it is just amusing – the orgy in Italy where all the men have forgotten to take their socks off; the American couple who hurriedly turn the camera off with an “Oh, s***” when the baby starts wailing in the next room; the woman who has just had her hair done in beaded braids, and who must have scraped off most of her husband’s retina before he suggests that they change positions. But that also makes it more lovely, too. People picking bits off fluff out of each other’s eyes; a teddy bear falling off the back of the sofa; people going “Ow”, or apologising, or falling into lulls during which they start chatting with each other before starting up again.

You know, porn-sex can sometimes look so terrifying. There’s never any drifting, or melting, or wondrousness, sporadically interrupted by coughing, children or cramp – which is, by and large, my understanding of the whole process.

The real novelty of youporn, however, is the power of the whole thing. You can see real, fidgety, impatient lust. There are big arses with a gravitas to them; tits that need to be gathered up in handfuls, rather than just sitting there on someone’s chest like snow-globes; people who get excited just stroking each other’s arms. This is more squirmy and fluid and squeezy and sensual than staged pretend porn, with its unreal people and unreal scenarios, and palpable air of disinfectant and clock-watching.

Quite why anyone would post on youporn, however, is another question entirely. I’d like to think that it was the work of uxorious, enlightened, feminist libertines on a mission to change mankind’s opinions on sex, love and pornography.

Does it make it any less beautiful if, in all likelihood, it’s posted by lunatic ex-lovers trying to ruin former partners’ chances of promotions within the Civil Service?

Marks makes Jimmy look like a tall Frank

I am continuing what I see as an enjoyable and informative trend by Times columnists to report on any suggestion of a renaissance at Marks & Spencer – the paper of repute chronicling the pants-supplier to the nation. Last week I had to take my brother, Jimmy, to the Marble Arch flagship branch, to kit him out for Cambridge, and the host of posh black-tie dinners therein. As he’s 6ft 3in, slender as a flute and resolute in wishing to dress like one of the Rat Pack – “Not Peter Lawford, because I disliked him in Easter Parade, but possibly Sinatra, if he weren’t a midget” – we suspected that this might be a difficult task. Not at the newly invigorated M&S, it wasn’t. It was like some kind of prewar service-culture idyll in there.

As Jimmy tried on his first jacket, an assistant called David sailed over, said, with owl-like wisdom, “It’s pulling across the back”, and spent the next hour-and-a-half bringing us possible suits, until Jimmy had found his ideal – something nippy and light by Timothy Everest. Alas, his size – rake-like giant – wasn’t in stock, so Rajini then took over, and spent 40 minutes ringing various branches (Belfast! Cheltenham! Norwich!) before sourcing it and getting it sent straight to the Cambridge branch, ready for Jimmy’s matriculation. What service! There have been years when I truly haven’t been as cared for by my own mother.

I still think its sushi is abominable, though.

Bye product

More badly chosen product names. Fred Zimmerman writes that, back in the Nineties, he was bought an aftershave called “Gammon” by his sister’s fiancé. “It was an astonishingly nice fragrance, given the name. However, I’ve never been able to bring myself to go into a shop and ask for a replacement,” he notes, with the appropriate air of melancholy for a man who realises that he will never smell of Gammon again.

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