S.W.A.L.K.

Today is NATIONAL KISSING DAY - a bit inconvenient, being a Monday, but maybe it will bring a bit of unexpected enjoyment to your journeys to and from work or, indeed, at work...

Of course, there are kisses and kisses...

And, as I'm sure you know, they're not all Romeo-and-Julietesque...

Nevertheless, here are a few interesting facts about kissing...

The 'science' of kissing is called philematology

A one-minute kiss burns 26 calories!

The average person spends 20,160 minutes of their lifetime kissing,
which amounts to two whole weeks!

Some people say that when you smooch a person with
the same hair colour, it results in a more passionate kiss

Of course, our imaginings (and, perhaps, our expectations) of kissing have been heavily influenced by the movies, and film stars have been puckering-up pretty much from the start of the industry. In fact, the first-ever on-screen kiss was in one of the earliest films to be commercially shown.

The Kiss (also known as The May Irwin Kiss, The Rice-Irwin Kiss and The Widow Jones) is a 47-second-long piece of 1896 actuality, recreating a scene from the New York stage comedy, The Widow Jones, starring May Irwin and John Rice.

According to Edison film historian, C Musser, the actors staged their kiss for the camera at the request of the New York World newspaper. The resulting film (directed by William Heise for Thomas Edison) was the most popular Edison Vitascope film in 1896, whose catalogue advertised it thus:

"They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time."

However, the film scandalized kinetoscope-goers in some places where it was screened and in some cities it was greeted with outraged newspaper editorials and calls for police action from high-minded moralists. One appalled critic spluttered: "The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other's lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting."

In 1999, this shocking piece of footage was deemed so "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress that it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

And, after all that, here's what's left of the original footage that caused all that fuss...

After that, the cinema got down to the serious business of snogging and here's a rather good montage of some (but, by no means, all) of the best of the screen kissers at work...

Since there wasn't so much as a single same-sex kiss in that reel, here's Jake and Heath (aka Jack and Ennis) getting to grips with a few manly kisses on (and off) Brokeback Mountain...

And two more, strangely overlooked, kisses that are among my favourite silver screen smackers, the first of which is one of the hottest (and wettest) clinches ever filmed: Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in the 1953 drama, From Here to Eternity...

"How did you plan the famous kiss scene?" I once asked the film's director, Fred Zinnemann. "Oh," he replied casually, "I asked Deborah and Burt to lie on the beach and we just waited for the tide to come in..."

And, finally, one of cutest cinema kisses: though it's scarcely more than a nuzzle of the muzzle, it's part of one of the most romantic - and, OK, kitchiest - love scenes in the movies. Yes, it's that dinner-date from Disney's 1955 animated feature, Lady and the Tramp...

Incidentally, that night of discreetly depicted canine bliss in the park is the reason why, in the film's final scene Lady and Tramp are seen as having been blessed with puppies!

Anyway, I hope you get a least one kiss today - even if it's from the dog!

Images: arty kisses by Auguste Rodin, Gustav Klimt and Frank Dicksee.