The moment of heart-sinking realisation came while I was stretching to tip a double mattress over a metal barrier and into a crate at the local council dump. A cold wind swept up my crotch and I looked down to see two worn out holes in my jeans. I had to immediately get rid of these and buy another pair.
I say 'immediately'. I didn't take them off and throw them after the mattress into the crate and then walk back to my car in my pants. Nor did I then drive into town and shop for new jeans still wearing my pants. I meant 'immediately' in relative terms. As in the next day. Today. Today I went shopping for jeans, one of the most unenjoyable necessary tasks in the life for someone like me.
'Someone like me' means someone male and middle-aged, who only wears jeans, because I'm not middle-class enough to wear cords, not elderly enough to wear trousers casually and far too dignified to adorn myself in grey tracksuit bottoms, the uniform of the more laddish type of man who feels the need to adjust himself only slightly less frequently than a public masturbator.
'Someone like me' means someone with only one other pair of jeans, who therefore needs something to wear when they're in the wash.
I actually have 3 other pairs of jeans, but one pair has gone missing since we moved house and the other pair - typically, my favourite black ones - no longer fit comfortably. This is because I have put on weight for the winter. By not giving a shit about what I eat. By not having any mirrors up in our new house that I can casually walk past and be reminded by my reflection, in no uncertain terms, that I really need to stop eating so much chocolate. And by not working at present and therefore not needing to fit into my work shirts or suits. I am, to put it kindly, not as lithe as I have been.
'Someone like me' has a disproportionately large head and short legs. A bit like Ernie Wise and Nancy Reagan's love child. Useful when I'm in the car, as people tend not to get too aggressive towards me, because presumably the size of my head is such that they probably think I am 6 foot 6 inches tall. This non-perfect shape means that I have to wear REGULAR or STRAIGHT fit jeans, otherwise I look too much like a spinning top. You've seen those short, overweight men in skinny jeans haven't you? Like a water balloon that's been squeezed at the bottom end. 'Someone like me' also has bandy legs, legs that would allow a pig in an alleyway to drive an aircraft carrier between them. Thus, SKINNY jeans are not for me. To be honest, they're not for anyone. I've already ranted at length about the current fad amongst Generation Z men for wearing hosiery modelled on the Childcatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
So there I was in TK Max today, browsing through the jeans, optimistically trying on 34 waist SLIM fit ones first. My current jeans are 34 waist. I think the Lycra in them helps me get away with it. It took the trying-on of 6 pairs of jeans to strike the jackpot. TK Max has this bloke in charge of the fitting room who wears an ear-piece and microphone like he has some reason to constantly communicate with others while doing his job. He's very polite and helpful, but overly so, given that I just want to try on some bloody £20 jeans. I'm not investing in a car or a house, though he is as attentive as if I was. I say 'attentive' - with a car or house, someone would come inside with you while you decided if you wanted to buy it, and he stopped short of joining me in the cubicle. (He did escort me part of the way though, holding the jeans for me.)
'Someone like me' is also mindful of getting a couple of years out of a pair of jeans. Therefore, once I realised that SLIM fit wasn't for me and 34 waist jeans from this shop were accentuating my muffin top too much and that the jeans with fashionably contrived worn patches or even holes would end up wearing out even quicker and that I wasn't going to pay over £35 because what's the point of exploitative sweatshops in China if we have to pay such a reasonably high price, I was reduced to about 3 pairs to choose from. I'd already looked in the SALE / CLEARANCE section, but as usual this was rammed with jeans with 46 inch waists and 26 inch legs. The jeans they can't sell, because men who have got themselves wedged horizontally in an industrial compactor for crushing cars haven't come into the shop enough. But as fate would have it, amongst those 3 pairs was one that did not make me look any more pitifully misshapen than I actually am.
All in all, a lengthy exercise. But as you may have worked out, I kind of need a bit of lengthy exercise.
