Pace yourself

 I read an interview with Chris Tarrant in the paper. The 72 year-old presenter had recently had a stroke and was now attempting to relaunch his career as a broadcaster of gravitas with a series of historical documentaries for Channel 5, Hitler's Holocaust Railways with Chris Tarrant.

 One claim in the feature sticks in the mind - "Tarrant is a confident man. He once boasted of drinking 20 pints, smoking 60 cigarettes and sleeping with four women in a single day."

 It's a curious boast.

 I find 60 cigarettes in a day easy to believe.

 Sleeping with four women in a single day is credible. Drinking 20 pints in a single day is also credible. But combining both in the same day is more difficult to comprehend. If the four women were prostitutes, or he was attending some kind of orgy it would make sense, but then that doesn't sound like something that someone in his position would boast about.

 How many of the four women did he already know, I wonder? Presumably he was already a public figure when this day occurred. Fame can have a curious aphrodisiac effect - I once spent an evening in the University of Birmingham Students' Union with one of the 'stars' of (poorly-regarded Channel 5 soap opera) Family Affairs and - watching a flow of shouting drunken girls proposition him - I observed that he could easily have had sex with four women in succession, providing he had no inhibitions about very quickly finding a place to do it in. But not after more than - what? - ten pints?

 Maybe the chain-smoking Tarrant had sex with the four women during the day and then - in a fit of remorseful emotional confusion - got hideously drunk afterwards. But, again, that wouldn't sound like something to boast about to me.

 The one conclusion that I did draw from this compelling claim was that if Chris Tarrant evenly paced his three activities over the course of the day, then you would imagine that the fourth woman would have got the rough end of the deal.