SUITS ME

In the end, it rather surprised me how much I actually cared about the suit I ended up buying. After all, I’ve never been much of a one for fashion and suchlike, but, as I headed out on a hot, sticky morning with a “couldn’t care less” attitude, little did I suspect that the ten minutes I intended to spend in the shop thinking about it would stretch to a couple of hours, a couple of shops and a great deal of actual thought.

You’ll notice already that going “bespoke” was off the table, as was the notion of going into the city and trying out some “proper” clothing shops. No, for me, it was always going to be the biggest M&S I could think of, a quick shufti around, grabbing one that seemed to fit, a dash to the tills, and then off to the garden centre just in time for tea.

Things did not go well on the journey in, as the bewildering array of roundabouts which need to be negotiated in that less than familiar part of town led me on more than one wild goose chase, and I finally arrived on the car park of the required retail park feeling hot and sweaty and irritable, which is never the most conducive state of mind to be buying anything in, especially clothing.

I strolled into the “menswear” department hoping not to catch the eye of an over-eager sales assistant and was generally lucky in that regard at least. One did come over and ask if help were needed but soon scuttled away when told that we might, but not yet.

At that stage I had a few criteria in my mind, none of which eventually seemed to be followed, but at that stage this didn’t matter. I walked around a bit, rather disappointed at the lack of range of three-piece options and how “nasty” the material looked.

I’m obviously used to better things, he lied, looking at his reflection in all its “George” clad horror…

I decided very quickly that I didn’t like this modern trend for large and very noticeable stitching on the edges of the lapels and such, that I vehemently disliked panel pockets, that I would not countenance double banked outer pockets, and any patterned materials were going to be a no-no, as far as I was concerned.

After a truly depressing ten minutes of this, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to find anything and left, mentally considering digging the old suit out of the cupboard and wondering whether I could still carry it off, if I could even still get in it.

As I moodily renegotiated the roundabouts, I noticed that I was quite near to John Lewis and, after gently chatting to my credit card so that it wouldn’t feel too shocked, I decided to risk a Saturday in another quarter of retail hell which I would normally not venture anywhere near in a month of, er, Saturdays…

Anyway, I descended into the circle of hell which is their basement, where all hope of middle-aged masculine dignity goes to die, and strolled around their suit department, and actually found one that I quite liked and, more importantly, might even be prepared to wear.

It fitted none of my pre-departure criteria. It was not black and only consisted of two pieces but, in the end, reader, I bought it…

I also bought the shoes the sales assistant just brought over because my rubbish casual trainers really weren’t helping to show the clothing off at its best. The matching tie was necessary because all of my ties are at least ten years old and most of them are crumpled beyond reason, but I did accidentally end up paying far more for a shirt than I ever have before because I mis-read the label (damn these varifocals!), and I (also accidentally) ended up using my debit card instead of my credit card because I am an idiot (all donations for food for the rest of this month gratefully received...).

Still it is a nice shirt… Or rather it will be for the one time that I’ll probably end up wearing it…

Naturally the helpful salesman was able to help me on my way to parting with my hard-earned by encouraging me with such gentle praise as “that jacket hangs really well for an ‘off-the-peg’ suit” and “the modern fashion is to wear the trouser length longer” and “if you have a navy blue suit you can go to practically anything” but at least I’m not likely to look that much of a clown when I venture out to this formal occasion in a few weeks. Now all I have to do is find a suitable matching waistcoat which doesn’t get shamelessly ridiculed - and no doubt increase the clown analogy - when I pick it out…

Anyway, let’s just hope the pounds stay off my waistline in the meantime, eh…? At least as efficiently as the pounds departing from my bank account did…

SUITS YOU

Well, I quite liked Friday’s cliffhanger, even if nobody else did. Of course it was never likely to be the sign-off that it might have resembled, not least because I would have been finishing all of our little communications which we transmit out into the big wide world on an odd number and you know that I would never allow THAT to happen…

Hmm… Referred to myself as “we” in that last paragraph. Delusions of grandeur…? A loss of the sense of self…? Or just trying to make these dark pages making their small stain upon the history of humanity look a little bit like a far more “professional” outfit…?

(Marketing is everything, you know, no matter how much of a despicable and dark art it might be… Like the worst kind of journalism, we tolerate it, but we don’t have to like it…)

Of course, it was always going to be a mistake to mention her loveliness, my beloved, in these pages, which is why I seldom do. After all, it would hardly be fair to write about someone who never reads these things and would be unlikely to speak in their own defence, and so I usually draw a veil over that aspect of my existence and instead draw you into my web of deception by telling you of the other things which occur - such as they are - and most of which are at least sort of true…

From a certain perspective at any rate…

Others whose lives touch upon mine, however tangentially, might disagree, but, if they do, well… Then they can write their own version of this nonsense from their point of view and I shall utterly reserve the right to disagree vehemently in the unlikely event that I should ever do anything significant enough to actually feature in their musings.

Anyway, I hope that you didn’t get the wrong impression about the beloved’s one word celebrity guest appearance in Friday’s outpouring from the dark byways of Lesser B.

Syntax and context are everything and she is, of course, the loveliest and most tolerant person on this planet. Well, she’d have to be to have put up with this old curmudgeon and his blunderbuss approach to tact and diplomacy for all of these years.

Anyway, with that preamble over with, here we still are, continuing with our conversation as if nothing had happened, however one-sided that conversation might actually be. I’m still tilling the barren soil in the hope of finding a lost hoard of roman silver in the thin and worn-out ground instead of the usual bits of old stone and the odd rotten potato which I fling out in your general direction in the hope that occasionally some of it might stick.

In a fairly short while, we are to attend another wedding. Now, despite all of the enjoyment many people get from such things, these are seldom my favourite occasions. That’s usually nothing to do with the people in question by the way, or even the event itself, it’s just down to me and my, well, not exactly “legendary” (I’m not that important…), but certainly familiar reaction to social occasions and the prospect of being in a room full of people I don’t know, all of whom might be in a “happy” mood…

In other words… A state of blind terror…

No I don’t know why it might be, but I blame the parents.

Mine, that is, not the ones involved in whichever wedding it might be.

Anyway, because this event is coming along fairly soon, I have to go out and buy myself a new suit. I still have some suits, some of which still actually fit me, but it is six years since I bought one to attend another wedding (in fact I liked it so much that bought two, one light and one dark…) so I guess that buying another one is rather overdue, even if the only opportunities I get to actually wear them are on the rare occasions that I can pluck up the courage to attend a wedding, the odd funeral, and when I go on holiday.

“A suit…? On holiday…? Are you mad?!!”

Well, it’s usually to make a determined effort to show that not all of the people getting off the plane arriving from a UK airport will be wearing baggy shorts and an unpleasant T-shirt.

We’re not all hooligans, you know…?

This time it has to be a three-piece suit that I get, because I need an excuse to use my bright shiny new pocket-watch which I was bought for my birthday this year which is a thing of rare beauty but it doesn’t go all that well with the usual slightly grungy look I cultivate for work these days.

Rather naturally I was planning on getting myself a nice little number in deepest darkest black (once the “twenty quid” option from the supermarket had been ruled out of the question anyway…), but that looks as if it might be flung off my options list as it has been deemed “too unforgiving” for someone of my age who is tending towards the portly…

“So” I asked, quite reasonably I thought “What other dark colours are there…?” (I’m with Henry Ford with this one) after all, despite me glancing lovingly across the room to where it hangs, my light linen suit was deemed too pale and inappropriate for the event and after that, only dark options were to going to be available for consideration.

Well there’s blue… (“I’ve already got a blue suit…”), grey (“It makes me look like a vicar…”), green (“Really…?”), brown (“Oh God, no…!”) and, er, that’s about it. I’ve already dismissed anything “shiny” or “pin striped” as looking a tiny bit sleazy, so the options are rapidly running out, it would appear…

“What about a really, really dark blue, a kind of midnight blue, only much darker…?” I suggest.

“You mean black, don’t you…?”

It might be a long day…

BEYOND THE LIMITS

“There is nothing wrong with your television set…”

One of the things that I’ve been doing with my evenings and whatever other moments of “free” time I have been getting lately is that I’ve been working my way through the box set of “The Outer Limits” which I found in an online “bargain bin” a few weeks ago. Forty-nine fifty minute episodes of post-McCarthyist, Cold War paranoia and all-round genius as broadcast on American television in the first half of the 1960s, and all for less than fifteen quid, well… it seemed like a bargain to me at the time.

I know that a lot of fans of more “modern” television might find such a thing laughable and a bit silly, but to me those old shows are really pure gold even if you do have to try and make allowances for the rather average looking rubber monsters.

I have, you might already know, spent a lot of my life as a television viewer ignoring such shortcomings, so that, at least, came as no difficulty to me, and there was an episode called “The Borderland” which just looked like a sixties version of J.J. Abrams “Fringe” to me, and opened up all sorts of possibilities for a “very special episode” that C.G.I. might offer…

After all, I do like a good anthology, and if the anthology also includes a lot that is analogy, then so much the better.

Once upon a long ago, during my brief sojourn into the world of academia, I managed to weave a whole thesis about how using fantasy, programme makers were able to sneak bigger “issues” out into the big wide world without the network controllers really noticing, so it’s not as if the topic is one with which I am unfamiliar.

I do sometimes think that I could write it far, far better nowadays, however, simply because I know more about the history and politics of the era I was writing about and have far more access to the actual programmes themselves, instead of just reading books about them as I did back in those days.

As an aside, I also like to think that I write better, too, but that’s not really for me to say…

Anyway, I’ve been slowly ploughing my way through those episodes whenever I’ve got the chance and I’ve sat through about a dozen so far. “The Zanti Misfits” have been and gone and a whole multiverse of new worlds still awaits me.

A couple of things have struck me though, and they’re mostly about something as banal and inconsequential as “fashion”, a topic that certainly failed to trouble me as that thesis was being written.

One episode started with what must have been, judging by the number of extras it would otherwise have required, some “stock footage” of “panic on the streets” and I was completely taken aback by how many hats that there were being worn by the average men in the streets.

And it wasn’t those baseball caps that you see so many of today on heads that should know better (or at the very least look in a mirror before heading out), but proper “trilby” style titfers. All of the gentlemen seemed to have one. In fact it was more unusual for someone not to be wearing one.

Then I started to wonder when exactly it was that men stopped wearing them, because it seems to have been a very sudden thing and it does rather look as if everyone pretty much came to this decision overnight.

“No more titfers, everyone…!”

“Okay then…” (Flings hat at hat rack in best “James Bond” style. Misses. Never wears it again.)

Strangely enough, if you watch “From Russia With Love”, old Jimmy Bond spends a lot of that film wearing hats, especially when he’s running about on that hilltop being harassed by a helicopter, but by the time of the next film “Goldfinger”, apart from the customary “hat stand” moment (and whatever happened to hat stands, too…?), and the scene on the golf course, by then they’ve pretty much vanished.

I wonder if that time is the moment when hats fell out of favour with the average gentleman…?

In fact, during all of the time Sean Connery played the part, he had a hat on in the opening “gun barrel” walk on, even when it wasn’t actually Mr Connery shooting the pistol but the stuntman Bob Simmons in the first three films.

But “The Outer Limits” also posed another fashion question that still needs answering. It has to do with women wearing dresses and heeled shoes. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of moments in this show (and indeed others from about that time) where it would have made perfect sense and been perfectly practical and logical choice for the woman in question to have put on a pair of trousers, but costume designers never, ever seem have considered that option in those days, and instead would make the young actresses clamber up mountains and through forests and whatever else the scriptwriters decided to put them through, in the most impractical outfits, almost as if it never crossed their minds that there was another option.

Was it simply the case that, in those days, women simply did not wear jeans or trousers at all and so putting them in such things would have been too radical? Well, that’s obviously not so. After all, Marilyn Monroe spends much of “The Misfits” in jeans, but maybe that was because her character was considered so very far “out there” that she could get away with it…? After all, if you see footage of “real” women from around that time in documentaries, they are almost always wearing dresses or skirts…

When did it happen then, that it became “acceptable” for “ordinary” women living their lives to start being seen out and about in trousers or jeans…? Again, did the world suddenly wake up one morning and decide that we were all fine with that…?

Before that, women wearing tousers, or men without hats, really would have seemed like something from… “The Outer Limits!”

THE VANISHED

Isn’t if funny how people you once knew quite well can eventually drop so completely off your personal radar that you can barely remember them at all?

Or is that really just me…?

I’m fully aware that I have a track record of failing utterly to keep in touch with anybody very much over the years and I’m beginning to notice, in this brave new “acquaintance heavy” world that it has grown into, that this may not have been the wisest of paths to choose, even though, on that allegedly “two-way” street through life, I can’t be the only one at fault here.  After all, whilst I do admit that I’ve always been utterly hopeless with names, I did used to be reasonably okay with remembering faces (I am – or I was - after all a “visual” kind of person), even if I wasn’t too sure quite where I recognised them from.

Pauses to remember the quite scary (for her, I imagine – she was, after all, just standing at the side of the road waiting for a taxi) “Gina McKee” moment where I was utterly convinced that she was someone I knew and recognised from a party held during the times when I lived in Levenshulme…

Thankfully I was persuaded otherwise and so my plan to go over and say “hello” that evening was quickly and very firmly nipped in the bud.

Sorry, Gina…

Anyway, enough of that nonsense. What were we talking about again…?

Oh yes, those people you once knew who you now barely remember…

I was forgetting where I was for a moment there.

I was actually thinking about this the other day when I had a small “flashback” of sorts to my student days.

A crowd of us used to drink together quite regularly and there was this girl who I used to talk to who was an occasional member of our extended social circle and, rather bizarrely as it might seem to the wider world at large, we seemed to get on rather well. I don’t mean in a “getting on very well”, “confessions of a youthful dalliance” kind of a way. This was, after all, the younger me we are talking about here, and I wouldn’t have noticed if somebody found me “interesting” or (God help them) “attractive” if they’d come into the bar wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with my picture and holding up a banner saying “We heart U, Martin!!! XXX” back in those days.

I probably still wouldn’t, if truth be told…

But, nevertheless we seemed to enjoy each other’s company and yet, for the life of me, I haven’t got the foggiest what she was called and, because I don’t have any pictures of her either, I wouldn’t be able to pick her out of a line-up if asked.

I’ll grant you that many of our conversations were probably slightly lubricated by a pint or five of Dry Blackthorn, which might go a long way towards explaining why I, at least, thought we got on so well, and that might also explain those missing memory cells when it comes to an actual name, but somehow she’s just slipped from my mind as the years have rolled inexorably onwards, and I can now only remember the barest trickle of information about her at all.

I can, for example remember that she was in the year above us and was studying “fashion design”. This I can recall because of one of the more memorable things another of my friends once said about her, that she was “The most unfashionable fashion student in the world” which probably also explains a lot, now that I come to think about it.

A random selection of people wearing
what was "acceptable in the 1980s..."
I don't know what became of any of them.

I vaguely recall that I thought that she looked a bit like a slightly lower budget or scruffier (in that studenty way we had in back then) version of Princess Di during her “engagement” phase, but then, that was hardly unusual in those days, because a huge proportion of the young women who I saw in those days seemed to be imitating that particular “look”, however subconsciously.

I can clearly remember the one memorable thing that she once told me, probably during a “1970s Party” in the days when I was actually “fun” enough to make at least a token gesture at “dressing up” – although, with the contents of my wardrobe in those days I probably wouldn’t have had to try too hard.

I was, am and probably always will be, somewhat “behind the times”…

Anyway, this is what she told me. She really believed that “1970s fashion will never come back it uses far too much material...” which I thought was quite astute at the time, but she was obviously quite wrong about that, as it did briefly (and scarily) come back “with a vengeance” about a decade ago.

Mind you, there was an awful lot wrong with what we were all wearing during the 1980s, too, although we were unaware of it at the time… Perhaps anyone studying “fashion design” who seemed “unfashionable” might have been on to something…? Still, it does strike me a both funny and a little bit sad how people really can just “vanish” from your life like that and leave virtually no trace of themselves behind.

As I approach my own half century, I do find that more-and-more I am beginning to wonder about the people I once crossed paths with, however obliquely, and whatever became of them. For example, one person I remember absolutely nothing about except for her pair of intensely mesmerising green eyes which didn’t seem at all drawn in my direction for much of an evening spent in a restaurant celebrating some birthday or other. Right now I can picture those eyes still, but nothing else about her springs to my mind at all.

I wonder what became of her…?

I’m sure that I’ll never know. This, I suppose, explains why the grey/silver shift in the strange and mysterious world of “networking” has started to manifest itself although I notice a distinct lack of any crowds desperate to re-acquint themselves with this battered old carcass.

And who can blame them…? To be honest I don’t think I was ever that memorable, and I’ve probably vanished from a lot of memories myself, but you’ve probably forgotten that already…