Big truth: the abrupt abandonment of inhibition merely makes sex easier not better though no one would deny that poppers’

Big truth: the abrupt abandonment of inhibition merely makes sex easier, not better, though no one would deny that poppers’ brief, blunt exhilaration and anonymous gay sex are natural partners.However, poppers’ reputation as an aphrodisiac, and their relative cheapness, only partly account for enduring popularity Drug fashions come and go, and still poppers rule, OK. True, different groups – students, ravers, supposedly 15 per cent of teenagers – have adopted amyl nitrate, but none accord poppers the paramount position gay culture does. None of them quite manages the equivalent of the gay man’s “poppers moment”. Watch me: you anticipate the coming of a favourite chorus or thundering bass line There it builds, builds, hold it, hold it .. Now. Just before it hits you remove the bottle from a hip pocket, press a finger to one nostril and sniff with the other. The music and instant rush of blood to the brain fuse into brief, obliterating, dislocated joy.Sure, anyone can do this.

But in other hands – and in other heads – it would lack ritual, a sense of history, the hum of resonance. It would be an individual action, not a communal gesture, like the patented passing around of the poppers bottle itself on request, and absolutely no previous acquaintance. “Can I borrow your poppers?” is the second most common gay club line after “You’ve been a naughty boy – go to my room”. And it is a request inevitably granted, not just because the rules demand it, but – this is a suspicion, not a fact – because there’s an implicit acknowledgement that this is one of those few times gay men can smile at one another, share, show some warmth, without asking anything back. Which may explain why poppers are quasi-routinely used in the bedroom, but seldom serve as actual sexual overture or pick-up bait – curious though none the less true, since poppers and the very notion of “gay”, not coincidentally, each came out around the same period in the mid-Seventies, when the product, in happy yellow and sexy red plastic wrappers, then symbolised utter visibility, an antidote to any leftover repression, fear, angst, a new order of ceaseless pleasure.Nowadays that packaged promise of release has mostly evaporated, the way poppers instantly will if smashed on a stone floor. Poppers are too ubiquitous, too taken for granted, as common as a handshake in certain quarters, though one would expect consumption this obviously wholesale – if Positively Healthy did have the inside track – to have resulted in hundreds of thousands more Aids cases than reported (not to mention the figures that should be now emerging from the aforementioned heterosexual groups). But sensational headlines have the advantage over the everyday and there isn’t much mileage in detailing the industrial stench, or how poppers have to be kept refrigerated and capped, otherwise they’ll go off like that, or in explaining that they ought to be left a good inch from the snout, otherwise the risk of circle burns around the nostrils is unflatteringly run, or how irritating it is when the top goes missing.

So it is deliciously but dumbly ironic that stale old poppers (simply leave them open overnight) could recapture their past outlaw swagger, be considered as more forbidden even than alco-pop, through the spectacularly redundant tactic of forcing them underground.Let’s, for a change, be straight: demanding that popper queens give up amyl nitrate is akin to telling Rastas to bid farewell to ganja – a waste of breath that would be better employed inhaling in short, measured bursts. Which has nothing to do with addiction, and everything to do with allowing adults already wearily well versed in the theoretical right to choose, the actual right to choose what – and indeed, who – goes into their bodiesn. Two minutes from Sway station in the New Forest is the Forest Heath Hotel, a handsome Victorian pub built to cash in on the new railway- age visitors to this beautiful stretch of southern England. Tourists have come here ever since to experience one of the last of Britain’s forests, to camp among its ancient trees, to send postcards home depicting the famous free-roaming ponies and to escape the modern world. This month, the modern world catches up with Sway, but in the most unlikely setting And, no, it’s not another superstore.

The coach house at the back of the Forest Heath Hotel has been transformed into Artsway, a gallery of contemporary art directed by Linda Fredericks, a local resident with many years of experience in visual and performing arts, and designed by Tony Fretton, the architect who designed the internationally acclaimed Lisson Gallery on London’s Edgware Road.
This small gallery is a small triumph, a local initiative that nurtures the best of contemporary art in a rural setting with no obvious or historic connection to the established art world. Just as exciting is the fact that Tony Fretton has demonstrated how a small, converted and extended rural building can be adventurous without being bombastic, gentle without being soggy.Throughout Hampshire, as in most of Britain, visitors in search of old- fashioned country towns are increasingly insulted by forms of folksy modern buildings. Labelled “vernacular” because they are meant to reflect local building traditions, they look much the same whether you are visiting Hampshire or Yorkshire. A few “historic” details glued on to a breeze- block construction, skinned in artificial stone or green timber, does the trick and, hey presto, a traditional-style building.Artsway proves, first of all, that a modern rural building can be imaginative and both forward and backwards looking at one and the same time. For a total cost of just pounds 200,000, Fretton has gently converted the existing coach house and added on clear and subtly lit gallery space sunk into the ground – to gain extra height – with the pure white spaces protected by an undulating clapboard skin reminiscent of an overturned boat.Stepping inside, the gallery seems much bigger than it is on the outside. In fact most adults standing outside the building can reach up and touch the eaves.