Win when you're swinging
Take a peek in the small ads and personal columns of both national and local newspapers and you might be surprised to observe that, throughout Middle England, there's a quiet revolution going on. Discrete references to "lifestyle couples" and "adult oriented holidays" barely hint at the huge swinging communities, now rampant throughout our leafy shires and sleepy suburbs. And as this funny and revealing series demonstrates, forget car keys in a pot: this has become a rather glamorous scene with swinging parties taking place in country manors or exotic foreign locations.

Get liberated
Proof that swinging is now fully established in the UK can be found in the shape of "Liberation": Britain's first "upmarket" club and hotel for swingers. Situated just off the A5 in Leicestershire, while Liberation has the usual fully-licensed bar, a la carte restaurant and nine en suite chalets, it also contains four "playrooms" - these include the voyeur's room and another furnished with "love angles", plush red velvet cushions that can be positioned for "an enhanced experience" - as well as a jacuzzi complete with handcuffs and, of course, a love swing!

Walking the dog
A new sex craze that takes swinging a step further is also now rife throughout Britain. "Dogging" combines technology with swinging and voyeurism as crowds, big and small, watch exhibitionist couples who have met on the internet have sex in cars - and sometimes join in. Dogging most often occurs in cars at rural parks, country lanes and large car parks and the term is thought to refer to the "walking the dog" excuse sometimes offered for an hour or two's absence. As you may have read in the tabloids, ex-footballer Stan Collymore has been known to indulge.

Tooth and nail
Another lesser-known sex scene you might not yet have comes across is "toothing". Centred around the use of Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones, strangers on trains and buses and at bars and concerts hook up for clandestine sex by text messaging each other with their phones. Through Bluetooth technology, which is short-range, people 'discover' other phones in the vicinity and send a speculative message: the usual greeting is: 'Toothing?' It's then a game of cat and mouse, trying to fathom who sent the message and discovering whether an attraction is there.

A convenient excuse
Although wife-swapping and group sex have been around for as long as humans have walked the face of this earth, it wasn't until the 1950s that swinging personal ad first began to show up. However, what is less well-known is that, in 1940s America, a swinging scene first formed among private groups of religious couples who decided that, since they didn't believe in divorce, they would swing instead to gain their sexual pleasures and throw private wife swapping parties.

Hey, hey we're like monkeys
The origins of the term "swinging" and "the swinging lifestyle" are not entirely clear but one theory reports it was coined by a minister during the last century, in order to label individuals who chose to have sex with people who they were not married to. The minister was trying to compare these consenting adults to monkeys, swinging from bed to bed as a monkey might swing from tree to tree! Little did he know that soon the term would be reclaimed by the swingers themselves!