SOMEHOW the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and Don the landlord don’t really go together.
The HFEA is a scientific body (soon to be axed, as it happens) providing fertility treatment to childless couples.
Last week it announced it was so concerned that many couples are now seeking IVF (in-vitro fertilisation) abroad that they are considering getting more home-grown egg and sperm donors to volunteer by raising the £250 “compensation” payment to much, much more, perhaps even £800.
Donors have to be thoroughly tested for a variety of disorders, meaning several visits to clinics. It is considered unethical for them to be “paid”.
That, I am afraid, is where Don the landlord comes in. Don is, or was, an almost perfect sperm donor, six-foot-two, lean-framed, nicely proportioned, good skin, pleasant angular features, superficially well-adjusted, probably exactly what the clinic was looking for. The trouble with Don the landlord was that he was a commonsense-free zone. He was a disaster.
My fear is that several hundred pounds per donation might lure him out of retirement and he’ll see it as a new call to arms to do the job he was probably best equipped for. Don first turned up in our village as the landlord of the pub by the church, the sort of run-of-the-mill local where lads establish their credentials on the dart boards, the bar billiards table and playing illicit games of cards out the back.
He told little coterie of drinkers he spent most of his time with that every time he made a successful contribution, the sperm bank gave him £25, certainly enough to cover his train ticket and a little illicit trading in Soho, where I supposed he bought his dope.
Instead, I cringed at the thought of women – trusting, child-yearning, unsuspecting women – getting impregnated with the spermatic idiocy of Don and his genes, of a new century where hundreds of my countrymen looked like Don, where the wheels of any industry or any enterprise we had would suddenly seize up because, at the centre of it all, would be a Don lookalike with that slack-jawed, uncomprehending expression he reserved for anything he didn’t understand.
Worse is the thought that Don is still alive in a hospital test-tube – like a good reliable Ford Cortina kept in a garage – and one laboratory technician is at this moment saying to another: “Let’s give her a shot of good old Hampshire Landlord – he seems to hit the bullseye every time.” Towards the end of his tenure, his trade almost non-existent, he could be found snoozing in the hammock he slung up above his public bar.
After a prod or two at the bulge in it he could be persuaded down to pull you a desultory pint. Nineteen years after his departure, we should not be afraid of Dolly the sheep or cloned beef, but the mutations of Don the landlord. I have no idea where he is now. That’s because he disappeared one morning, leaving the pub open to the world and the keys in a new Range Rover he’d somehow persuaded a finance company to buy for him.
But this week’s news about egg and sperm shortage has brought him back with a shiver. Is Don the true father of our nation?
For more on this story follow the link: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/196353
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