Shock! Becks was texting while driving

In the outer security zone of the Palestine and Sheraton hotels in Baghdad, beyond the tanks, are the Al-Andalus apartments and the Al-Andalus Internet café. It was there that — last Tuesday night over a cup of Nescafé — I first learned about the David Beckham story.

It was not easy to piece together; my favourite sites — BBC News Online and Guardian Unlimited — were being very discreet.

So I entered the key names into the Google search engine and discovered from the Vietnamese Express that, ‘Nhn v*t chính trong v* Beckham dính vào scandal tình d*c, Rebecca Loos, là ngu*i **ng tính.”

And quite a lot of dong tinh too, by the sound of things. A Norwegian site added some detail. ‘David Beckhams personlige assistent Rebecca Loos,” it told readers, ‘skal ha innrømmet Ã¥ ha hatt sex med den engelske landslagskapteinen.”

Not once, but many times. Or, as the Berita Harian of Kula Lumpur put it, ‘Rebecca kecewa apabila Becks tidak berbuat demikian dan mula mencari jalan membalas dendam.” Men and their membalas.

Arriving back from the diversions of a war zone hasn’t made it any easier to decipher the story. In this week’s Sun, for example, there was what claimed to be a reproduction of a moving text sent by Beckham to a woman called Sarah (the text was moving in the sense that the author claimed to be driving along in a Ferrari 550 when he sent it).

And it read: ‘I could stop the car pull the hand brake. Lie u on the front of the car, slide my hands up your *******, pull them down and kiss all the way up the inside of your legs and then I would **** you and **** your ******* and then make love to you on the car.”

It’s like a cryptic crossword. Seven letters, unhyphenated, something plural that you can slide your hands up and then pull down. My

best guess — duvet cover — doesn’t fit.

And I can make no sense whatsoever of the second seven-letter word. Six letters and we would be laughing, but I would be obliged for readers’ best seven-letter guess.

Despite these linguistic difficulties, there are certain things to be learned by the observant from this week’s Beckham nonsense.

One is that people can understand the same story in different ways. According to Sarah, she and Beckham took to calling themselves Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, with Victoria cast as frumpy old Wendy.

But, not having kids to read to, Sarah seems not to have realised that men marry Wendys, not Tinkerbells. But then this is a person who, allegedly, has fabulous, unrepentant sex in the Beckhams’ bed, yet when she uses Victoria’s hairclip in the bathroom comments: ‘I shouldn’t have done that.”

Lessons, too, from the bilge that is spoken afterwards. A Virginia Blackburn wrote in the Express that: ‘If there is one person in the entire world you would have thought would have been faithful to his wife, it’s David Beckham.”

And other women columnists blamed Victoria for the alleged affairs on the basis that she was ‘greedy, grafting and graceless” (Amanda Platell, Mail), or a ‘part-time wife” (Sue Carroll, Mirror).

Platell’s suggestion is that had Victoria been more attentive and matronly, then her husband could never have been seduced by any of the succession of gorgeous models he bumped into during the course of his life. Blackburn’s is that you cannot be a decent family man, love your wife and kids, and still enjoy sex over the bonnet of a Ferrari.

A more realistic (if unwittingly honest) assessment was given by England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson, who commented that ‘All international players in England realise they have to live with this kind of thing.”

Given that Eriksson himself did indeed have an affair with Ulrika, what he is actually saying is that ‘famous blokes get to have a lot of illicit sex”. His girlfriend, Nancy, is, of course, famously attentive, Amanda.

Opportunity, as ever, is the key. Note Beckham’s alleged words to both his alleged lovers: ‘I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t help it.”

Show me a man who spends the week in town, and the weekend with the family, and I will show you an adulterer in fact or in the making. Or, as Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey toasted in Master and Commander: ‘To wives and sweethearts! May they never meet!”

It may turn out that this is all invention. And, in a way it’s none of our business, just as our spouse’s diary is none of our business, or the fact that a neighbour is having an affair, or any of the other things we like to know.

If it isn’t, then one fantasy must give way to another. The fantasy of finding a gorgeous man who will be faithful to you will be replaced yet again by the more realistic one of finding a gorgeous man who will be unfaithful with you. Only one person at a time can marry Beckham, but, if these stories are true, many more can enjoy him.

Or, as Shakespeare put it in Much Ado About Nothing: ‘Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more / Men were ********s ever / One f*** in sea, and one on sh*** / To one ***** constant never / So **** not so, but let it go … / Be you blithe and bonny / Converting all your songs of woe / Into — hey ***** *****.”

In any case, the real scandal, if all this text stuff is authentic, is that the engelske landslagskapteinen was purple-texting while driving a sports car at speed.

‘I nearly crashed after that last text,” he is quoted as texting. His insurance company may not be amused to read that. And tourists will agree that the roads of Spain are dangerous enough as it is. —