5 rules to follow if you must pash in public

Don't look now, but there would appear to be a rash of rather ghastly Public Displays of Affection (PDAs) doing the rounds.

Film star Nicole Kidman and her husband Keith Urban engaged in a couple of unsightly kisses on the red carpet for the Paddington movie. In the first attack, she bent down to reach her diminutive spouse, umbrella aloft, in the manner of an over-attentive Mary Poppins. In the second, Urban could be seen methodically sucking on her lower lip. Meanwhile, pop singer Nicole Scherzinger engaged in a bizarre not-so close encounter with Formula 1 paramour Lewis Hamilton's driving helmet, a gesture that screamed showmance.

As you read this, your face will be puckered into an image of distaste. We do not do this. PDAs are for children and foreigners - the emotionally incontinent, and/or people with something to prove. The most we should be prepared to hazard in public is a spare kiss on the cheek, or the occasional linked arm. Hand-holding is for tweenagers, lip-on-lip action a matter for the privacy of one's own home.

Even social kissing should be viewed as a repellent affectation that has somehow taken hold.

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If one must do it, then know that there are rules.

Make it consensual

The Prince of Wales and his first wife specialised in non-mutually cooperative PDAs. At first, we had Diana mooning misty-eyed over her prince, with said prince looking somewhere between mystified and appalled. Later, Diana would bolt away from his advances, as in the famous incident at a prize-giving ceremony in Jaipur in 1992 where she turned emphatically away as her husband went in for her cheek. Awks.

PR it

Put time in to rehearsals. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who met while pretending to be a couple, really know how to work a PDA. Theirs are intimate without being explicit, with a range of well-developed sub-gestures such as eye contact, leg pattings and coquettish head angles. It's convincing stuff that doesn't solely seem aimed at making Jennifer Aniston feel awful.

Context is all

For the sake of public decency, there needs to be a ban on posing for PDAs in the wake of rumours, or indeed confirmation, of affairs. Classics include politicos David Mellor and Piers Merchant exhibiting slimy uxoriousness at their garden gates. Victoria Beckham became the subject of her husband David's public attentions after rumours of his affair with Rebecca Loos. Staging this on a ski slope -surely one of Victoria's least favourite locales - made matters still more improbable.

No straying into soft porn

The "personality" Kim Kardashian and her musician husband, Kanye West, enjoy nothing more than gratuitously parading their intimate moments, taking the PDA to a new level: the PDDA, or Public Display of Digital Affection. One's audience should not feel as if it has inadvertently entered into a dogging scenario.

If you insist on doing it, mean it

When push comes to shove, the ultimate motivation in getting a PDA right would appear to be knowing that said image will end up on a mug. Will and Kate know how it's done: chaste, darting, blushing, and ridiculed by the Duke of Edinburgh.