Male fashion farces

Continuing with the theme of male attire, it would be remiss of me not to pour scorn on some of the fashions that British men have ascribed to over the years; after all, my jug of scorn is never empty and this particular feature of social absurdity is a fertile field, ever-thirsty for more watering.

I look around these days at your average stereotypical hipsters and I feel privileged not to be a millennial.  But then I remember that even when I was 14-24, I never signed up fully to any clothing or hairstyle trends, so I’d be unlikely to adorn myself with the indignity that accompanies a look that is essentially cartoon Mumford and Sons ‘twattire’.  I’d probably grow a beard, I have nothing against beards, except of course my face for most of the year, but I’d stop well short of one of those oily pubic bibs that hangs off a hipster’s chin like a clump of dung stuck to a buffalo’s arse. I might favour a short back and sides, but not that more extreme cut that, when accompanying the beard, conjures up images of late Victorian, sepia-toned photographs.  I’d avoid both the nu-folk tweed that your proper Mumford twats choose as part of the affectation as much as I’d avoid the skinny jeans that are so skinny that they look like tights.  What worked for Max Wall certainly doesn’t work for a top-heavy hipster, whose torso is either too fat or too gym-inflated muscly to sit atop a pair of splindly legs without looking like the love-child of Bluto and Olive Oyl.

When I was young enough to be tempted by the styles of the day, I only went about a quarter of the way along that fashion spectrum.  My mid-80s mullet, while being long enough to have me sent home from school to have an inch cut off it, never put me on the same barber shop wall as members of those communities whose caravans perch behind barricades of bin bags on A-road sidings outside of Hatfield.  I liked to think that I looked like Bono, I certainly have the same nose:height ratio.  It didn’t do me as many favours as it probably did for Bono though.

And then when the whole Madchester scene swept the nation as I turned 19, my jeans may have had some give in them, but could hardly be called baggy, because there has to be a line. Yes, I styled my lengthening fringe into curtains flanking a centre parting, but there was a mathematically calculable point at which the slack in both trouser material and hanging fringe made you a quantifiable dickhead.  (I had enough dickhead tendencies not to exacerbate things by trying to look exactly like Shaun Ryder).

A fashion that I steered completely away from was the early 80s wedge, that leviathan fringe of high-lighted hair that enabled boys and men to look like middle-aged housewives.  What was the hairstyle of young men for two years became the hairstyle of their mums for the next twenty.  Watching the video for Wham’s Last Christmas makes me recall a one-time best mate - a fellow devotee of Madness, with whom I’d bus it down to Stiff Records in Camden every time a new single came out - who I lost to the cult of Duran Duran.  Yes, he got a girlfriend as a result of his transformation into a beauty salon Frankenstein, but he had to listen to shit music as a result.  No girlfriend could be worth doing that to your hair and then swinging that glamorous wedge to The Reflex.

It’ll be interesting to see what fad in men’s fashion comes next.  Perhaps male grooming will run its course and the term will revert to it original 1970s BBC Disc Jockey description.  Perhaps men who aren’t nonces will reclaim moustaches back from the men who are.  Maybe the next line of sports casual wear - after the constipated era of grey tracksuit bottoms for every working class white lad - will build on the gentrification that spawned the look of the Max-Wall-legged minge-faced hipster and reignite a love for Alan Partridge Pringle jumpers and diamond patterened socks in pastel shades.  Who knows? The only self-evident truth is that those who go the whole hog, only serve to stand out as the clowns in the whole fashion circus.

And if you’re wondering what propmted this rant, then it was a visit to the barber for the same hair-cut that I’ve had for twenty years and his offer to do my eye-brows while he was at it. Obviously I declined - that’s one bit of male grooming that I have to do myself.

Don we now our gay apparel

I’ve always suffered from DSS. Not the sofa people, but DSS as in Delayed Sartorial Self-realisation. Meaning that there is usually a delay between buying an item of clothing and telling myself that it was a mistake. That delay has ranged between a day and about twenty years.

Like most people I didn’t develop any pained self-consciousness in regard to my apparel until adolescence kicked in; which is lucky given the array of sleeveless knitwear and patterned flares my parents foisted on me during the 70s.  The first battle I had with my Dad was over the width of the hem on my school trousers. Each turbulent August we’d go shopping for new school uniform, and I’d immediately head for where you’d find sta-prest drainpipes with 12 inch hems.  Twelve was the absolute maximum width to avoid flapping material round your ankles. At my school, there was a kid whose third nickname (his first was ‘Psycho’, his second ‘Norman’) was ‘Ding Dong Daley’ in response to his risibly unfashionable bell-bottomed trousers. When my Dad disparaged the 12 inch-hemmed sta-prest that I would hold up in hopeful inspection, he’d scornfully claim that the material was shit and that they’d never hold a crease; and then he’d hold up something smarter.  I’d immediately check the ankle dimensions of his choice and on discovery that these were 14 inches, I’d suffer silent convulsions imagining the whole school chanting ‘DING DONG!’ at me, with even Daley joining that chorus.  My dad failed to understand my utter revulsion to flapping material and one year he was understandably pissed off enough to buy me some 16 inch-hemmed bastards and force me to wear them to school.

I lasted one day, one day playing the part of a fashion pariah, and that evening my mum kindly took needle and thread to the calf-sails that had ruined my life (*blighted my day).

When I was a bit older, old enough to get a paper round, I had the financial independence to purchase my own school shoes and splashed out on some awesomely trendy burgundy slip-ons.  My dad, despite being disenfranchised from this decision, sought to undermine it by calling them ‘poofter shoes.’  My poofter shoes lasted about two weeks at school before wearing down through the rubber sole to the wood in the heel.  The fact that this happened so swiftly and at such a strange angle on the outside of each foot, meant that not only was I a poofter who wasted fifty quid on shit quality shoes, but I had a funny walk as well. (‘HOW do you bloody walk?’ Dad asked)

Like most animals, we tailor our appearance in order to attract a mate.  An all-boys-school environment in my teens equipped me with NONE of the social skills essential to instigating a non-platonic relationship with a female, so by the time I started university I was heavily reliant on (you might say ‘overcompensating with’) two much-treasured items of clothing - a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of cowboy boots.  The boots were referred to (by friends, who loved to revel in irony) as my ‘pulling boots’. My dad didn’t ever call them ‘poofter boots’ (probably because he’d realised I was in sore need of every encouragement possible in my fruitless quest for a girlfriend),  but in retrospect I’m not sure how I managed to overlook their contrary associations. This was a decade after the Village People released YMCA, after all.

In many ways I’m a creature of habit.  I’ve nearly always owned a pair of Chelsea boots (some new ones for work coincidentally even arrived today) and I have favoured a black leather jacket over anything else except a Harrington.  But sometimes you reflect on your own sad predictability, purely because society mocks such a personality trait, and you foolishly and ineptly attempt to be unpredictable on occasion. In need of a new jacket once in my 20s, I veered away from the safe option of aforementioned black leather jacket and selected a windcheater of less monochrome character.  It was racing green with crimson sleeves.  It couldn’t have been worse if it had had white chevrons on it and came with a racehorse to sit on. A fail in every respect. The wind cut through it like a knife as well.

Since those days I’ve not succumbed to anything quite as garish or pitifully embarrassing - although while supporting Arsenal I could sometimes be seen sporting the kind of tasteless clothing merchandise that has prevented football club shops ever being featured in Vogue magazine - but I’ll finish with a tale of wearing the right thing but in the wrong place.  I was once in a shop called Wilko, an emporium of good value homeware where I sadly indulge my fetish for buying cleaning products, and a woman approached me to ask where something was.  Within seconds of wondering why the fuck she’d asked me, I looked down at the t-shirt I was wearing.  I’d recently been to a gig to see Dr Feelgood’s enigmatic guitarist playing solo, and his name was emblazoned in big letters across my chest - Wilko Johnson.  Surreally, the Wilko cashier I went to that day was a man of more advanced years but similar music tastes to my own, and his reaction to my Wilko t-shirt was to tell me how much of a fan of the guitarist he was and how he’d seen Dr Feelgood in the 70s. Or something along those lines, I’m not sure, because he had a really quiet voice; and so I just nodded politely at his long and inaudible monologue and assumed that he’d worn sleeveless knitwear and flares to the gig. Possibly with poofter shoes.

Heads up their arses

One of my Dad’s most frequently employed derisive metaphors is that most poetic of contemptuous epithets, ‘He’s got his head up his arse.’ Now, I’m quite a visual learner, so as a child I was highly receptive to such an illustrative phrase.  But after several sore and failed attempts at contortionism, I worked out that he wasn’t being literal.  Because of course it is a biological impossibility, isn’t it?  You can’t push a 10 inch parcel through a 1 inch letterbox.  But the older I get, the more I find my eyes attuned to the figurative. Apparently there is a school of modern philosophy which attests that ‘metaphor and symbol act as the primary interpreters of reality’.  Which leads me to conclude that some people do actually walk around with their heads properly up their arses.

The evidence is stark and you have to spend most days trying to avoid it, because quite simply it either gets in the way or it threatens to bump into you.

Example number one is that person in front of you on route to a train platform. As he reaches the ticket barrier, he stops dead, causing you to brake sharply in your commuting trainers, and he puts his head RIGHT up his arsehole, for this appears to be the place that he has chosen to store his ticket. It takes a few seconds to find it, for it is dark up there and on a bad day also quite slippery. And a few seconds is all that is needed to cause a commuting pile-up.  Obviously, you’re caught in a sandwich now, because, although the person behind you had the organisational common sense to have ticket in hand on approach to the barrier, she had opted to casually insert her head up her own rectal orifice in order to stare obliviously at her phone screen.  (Example two).  You have to crowbar your way out of this shithead centipede, head through an alternative barrier and stand no closer than your own height from the edge of the platform just in case one of those two dozy fuckers walks into you and knocks you in front of a train (something you ironically start to wish for by the end of your commute to work.)

Given the fact that most people have a fair amount of time sat bored and listless on a train, time for which you can forgive them the need to shove their heads up their arses in an undistractable phone-induced trance, you’d think that there could be absolutely NO FUCKING NEED AT ALL to continue staring at their phone as they get off the train and walk among humans.  Out of a crowded station, through a crowd forced to move at the same pace as the slowest common denominators as they stare at their phones, and into the street, where there are further hazards, wheeled, fast moving ones at that.  I wonder if there is an app that warns you of someone approaching, in order to save a person the trouble of pulling their head out of their arse and looking up. If such an app exists then its range is pretty poor, because most of these dopey cunts only swerve to avoid others once they are inches away from collision, like some shit early prototype of a driverless car.

If the trauma of avoiding injury on the pavement is enough to tempt you into walking blindly into the road and running the more calculable risks associated with fast moving over-sized cars, then you are forgetting example three, cyclists.  Despite the tautness of the Lycra across their arses, they still manage to find a way to stick their heads up there.  This skill is a wonder of modern idiocy, because they are able to do it and still cycle 10mph over the limit whilst paying sharp attention to the vehicles around which they weave, under-take and dart in front of.  But this skill has its limits, because the view from inside their commodious colonic canals does not afford them any awareness of pedestrians or traffic lights.  But no matter to them, because they have right on their own side, with their ecological sanctimony and self-righteous desire to reclaim the roads. Arrogant zealots.

If you have the misfortune to travel by the locomotive train’s younger and dirtier sibling, the London tube train, then you will surely find yourself the elbow target of my fourth and final selected example from the Head-up-arse School of Numbskull.  People who run for tube trains at busy times can be accused of wearing their own scphincta as a neck-tie for two reasons: one, they slalom through non-existent gaps in the crowd like coke-fuelled stock car racers; and two, they display an  undignified desperation that is made all the more risible by the fact that missing one train incurs a forfeit of a WHOLE FUCKING 2 MINUTE wait until the next one arrives.

I’ve just realised that I could go on.  By this point it’s not yet a quarter to eight in the morning and depending on your job and the head:rectum width ratio of those you encounter, the subsequent ten hours could well continue to require nifty footwork and extreme patience.  I won’t go on, though, in case I bore you even longer.

And if you’re reading this on your phone whilst walking along, then Get your head out of your fucking arse!

Train Bastards

Add these things together and see what you get:

• A working day averaging 11.5 hours in an inner London secondary school
• Not having eaten since before noon
• Getting on a train home at 7.30pm
• Nursing an obsessive hatred for discourteous people
• Self-diagnosed misophonia aka ‘select sound sensitivity syndrome’ or ‘sound rage’
• A firm belief in the current existence of an inexorable social malaise 
• Being an irritable and moody bastard

What you get is a journey home from work each day in which I punctuate attempts at escapism (reading a novel about brutal murders in the creepily remote Icelandic countryside) with shooting homicidal side-eyes glances at fellow commuters guilty of the following hanging offences:

1. Watching videos or playing games on their phones without headphones.  The videos tend to be short and quite possibly amusing to watch, something someone has posted on Facebook no doubt, and therefore, in the minds of those with retarded social sensibilities, unlikely to cause offence if played loud for half a minute in a confined public space. Wrong, you bollock.  A sudden shattering of (usually a temporary) silence by the distorted cackle of laughter that soundtracks most of these videos only serves to make me wish for a superpower in which I am able to telekinetically cause objects of my choosing to force themselves twelve inches up their owner’s anus. The same applies to mindless phone games. I’m happy to support other people’s rights to their own escapism, but the electronic sound of bubble-popping coming from a game designed for monocellular cerebral organisms like the  mindless twats addicted to them does indeed tempt me to support organisations advocating forced euthanasia of the stupid.

2. Loudly having a work conversation on the phone.  In a self-important attempt to demonstrate that they have a busy job of making big decisions and telling people what to do, it seems that some train bastards are either actively craving a public audience or inconsiderately oblivious to the fact that they have one.  You never hear anyone talking loudly on the phone to someone at work in a compliant way, agreeing to follow an instruction or asking what they think. This behaviour is always a narcissistic showboating of whatever petty authority they happen to be endowed with in their dull and pointless, paid occupation.  Again, that wished-for superpower would save us all from this aural irritation.

3. Placing bags on the seat next to them, particularly when they sit on the outside.  This is the strategy of the selfish to discourage less confident fellow commuters from asking if they ‘may sit there’.  No matter that a train is busy and undoubtedly someone will want to sit there.  They expect to be asked, because they have already laid claim to that extra seat by plonking their bag there in the manner of a 19th century British imperialist, territorially erecting a flag and daring the indigenous inhabitants of the land to challenge their audacious act of expansionism.  My first desire is that if they’re going to act in a territorial manner then so will I, by pissing on the spare seat.  But you know what they say about who you’d give the steam to, so I usually settle for just telling the cunt to move.

4. Eating.  There is rarely an excuse for eating on a train. There is never an excuse for chewing with your mouth open. No one enjoys the descant of saliva-soaked slurping or that malignant combination of crisp-packet rustling and crisp-crunching consumption. To cope with this I scroll through Facebook hoping that someone has posted a video of pigs eating cold sick so that I can play it loud.

5.  Man spread.  I shouldn’t be too intolerant here. If your brain has made its way from your skull to your bollocks then I guess it must be uncomfortable to have your legs at anything less than a 180 degree angle.

My train pulls into St Albans at 8pm.  My wife usually collects me from the station. Apparently I’m a real joy to have in the car at this time.