Two Chaps Talking

Dear T,

Forties Cromarty Forth Tyne Dogger

It is silly season here in the steaming metrop. Not to be confused with the silly season in effect nationwide with the lunatics in charge of the asylum of which more later. No here in the hot Apple the temperature is ungodly and the humidity like a children’s paddling pool when the wee little thing couldn’t wait. I kid you not.

I won’t deny there are certain benefits to living in this inferno. Combined with the current fashion for ladies to wear skirts that are not terribly long and trousers that are not particularly high the heat has exposed areas of delicately displayed dermis of which I had hitherto only dreamt. But as with so many other guilty pleasures one is forced to pay a hefty price. I talk of the casually dressed male.

I shall now be a tad controversial.

Your average New York male is not terribly well-dressed.

I know there are exceptions of course, but these exceptions merely serve to prove the rule. I might further suggest that many not only get dressed in the dark but if questioned later would have no clue as to what they were actually wearing.

Imagine for a moment taking an itinerant’s undershirt and dipping parts of it in tea. Then attaching it to a pair of ragged cotton tramp’s trousers and dragging them behind your open topped Land Rover while pursuing a poacher across the lower fields. Finally, rather than offering these rags to the groom to wipe his hands on after mucking out, imagine putting them in a boutique and offering them for sale. It is quite beyond the pale.

One of the principal purveyors, or pushers, of these rags is a chain of outfitters called The Gap. You won’t have heard of them. They are named I believe after the gap in a chap’s brain where his sense of decorum should be.

How a corporation can be so callous as to foist upon these poor saps the aforementioned rags is nothing less than a crime against common decency. Whither the seersucker suit? The cotton bags? The white nubuck lawn shoe? Frankly I’d settle for Livingstone’s safari shirt and cotton duck trousers. But no. These people parade round in torn shorts, worn T-shirts and flip flops.

Women in skimpy summer clothes often look splendid. Men rarely do. It is a fact of life. It has nothing to do with one’s preferences. Hairy legs and backs with bulging bellies and sweat patches versus trim, tanned and hairless limbs. Enough said.

Let us move on.

Fisher German Bight

We know they tell lies, it is their nature. That is why they are so roundly loathed. But when they attack one of our own I am bound to join in the fray and get my size nines stuck in. During the recent little Unpleasantness one of the crooks currently running this place suggested that a staple of modern civilisation should substitute the word British for Baghdad.

It seems he was disturbed by the concept of chaps telling other chaps what was going on during the Unpleasantness even if it wasn’t in accord with the fairy tale coming from the Cowboy-in-Chief. Just what you’d expect from this junta and to be pitied rather than censured. Well that’s all well and good until I hear that our own bunch of jackals are at it too.

Evidently it wasn’t enough for the PM to wedge his snout up the C-i-C’s backside before the Unpleasantness. He now wants to earn another bone by attacking our most beloved institution. Perhaps in return for the bauble they recently agreed to give him.

I won’t go into the myriad reasons why HM’s Gov should push off and leave Auntie alone. Suffice to say that if Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama swear by it then chances are it’s not all bad.

Far from home with nought but a short wave radio there is nothing on this earth as comforting as the shipping forecast or the Archers. And when someone in the news gets a bit above themselves and a Chap has access to a computer it is a joy for him to watch Paxman or Humphrys tear out the miscreant’s throat and feed on their entrails.

It means little to the locals round here as they are fed pap dictated by the C-i-C and to question it is treasonable. But that simply increases my pride in our noble institution.

It is us at our best and without it we would all be poorer.

Yours with cheque book out to pay the licence fee,

S

Posted by S at 03:18 PM | Permalink

Dear boy,

How I sympathise, sitting here in London, sweating like a therapist.

You're not alone in your loathing of the Gap. A brief flick through a nearby marketing tome suggested that it is supposed to stand for 'Great American Public', their intended demographic. Were that indeed true, one would expect to see racks of vastly oversized leisure suits in hideous colours of velour bearing decals of cuddly kittens and baseball caps with the logos of beer and tractor companies. Intrigued, I delved further, locating an urban legend that it actually stands for 'Gay And Proud', supposedly a reference to its origins in San Francisco. An amusing theory but, frankly, most gay men I know have far too much taste to be seen in khakis. As with all urban legends it's wise to check with www.snopes.com, which informs us that...

"Gap Inc. was founded in 1969 by Donald and Doris Fisher as a single store staffed by a handful of employees. The retailer took its name in homage to "the generation gap," a term popular in the late 1960s describing the intellectual, ethical, and social gulf between young people and their parents' generation".

...which would be lovely if it was still true.

You're the expert in these things, Old Top, but it strikes me that the GAP chooses styles and palettes each season that are so distinctively undistinguished that they scream their provenance far more obviously than any large and tasteless logo. This summer, on this side of the pond, at least, it's a carefully crafted pastiche of grunge/skater/combats/college kid that looks mannered enough on a teenager but beyond appalling on an adult.

Fortunately I had a gig last week, teaching at a large UK art college whose name, for reasons of discretion, I shall gloss lightly over. I was able to ask a room full of students why they would consider shelling out £40 for a pair of recreated washed-out combats that purported to make them look like students.

If it was just students that would be fine - they can dress how the hell they like - God knows, almost anything looks good on you when you're 20 - but, and here I'll lapse momentarily into marketingspeak, it's the phenomenon of the 'kidult' or 'adultescent' that really makes the blood run cold. Why grown-ups who can afford more and know better persist in dressing like children is an unending source of amazement to me.

Any event one attends now is populated mainly by idiots on corporate jollies so cocktail parties, concerts, the opera, the races, regattas, college balls are full of people who are not there because they want to be but through some mean spirited belief that they're getting something for nothing so they might as well. This means that the dress code becomes looser by the day. On the rare occasions I'm now asked to turn up at something in a suit or in black tie, I'm surrounded by people who've either knocked up some parody of an ensemble from the depths of the wardrobe or who have ignored the code altogether. It's almost like an unwritten rule. 'Wherever there are more than four men in black tie, one will be wearing either a) a coloured tie and/or cummerbund b) ironic sneakers c) sunglasses or d) a plastic gun in a shoulder holster. Often someone is wearing all four.

Though it pains me beyond measure to admit it - Even the bloody Americans do better than this.

A fortnight ago I had to run a conference at the Grand in Brighton. As you'll remember, it's a stupendous Edwardian erection with a stunning cast iron staircase and view over the rusting bones of the old pier. The ghosts of Pinkie and Neville Heath stalk the corridors and fragrant old ladies take tea in the conservatory every afternoon. It's clichŽ to compare Brighton to a blowsy but much loved old brass but the Grand makes the comparison inevitable.

What is saddest is that, as the English seaside holiday has lost ground to the cheap package to Florida, the grand hotels have been forced to turn to the conference market to survive and that means a hotel awash with low-rent salarymen. Away from the battery hutch of his stinking office, the English yuppie is a repellent creature. The foyer, dining rooms and, though it almost makes me weep to write it, the cocktail bar were stuffed with improperly dressed men. Though most of the women strove to make an effort, the decerebrate and oafish males wore combinations of tropical shirts, random lengths of trouser and hideous 'technical' sandals. Why? Why do these idiots feel that the only way to express the fact that they have momentarily escaped the cosh of commerce is to dress like gibbons in a fancy dress box? Is this the only place they feel they can rebel?

Of the 'Hawaiian' shirt there is little to say. They are amusing collectors items. They might be ironically appropriate at a beach party in Los Angeles but otherwise are worn only by overweight men concealing either a belly at the front or a handgun at the back. A man with nothing to hide has no need of a Hawaiian shirt

What, then, is the point of a three quarter length trouser? God knows plus fours have been a source of ribald amusement since the 20s. Is there any reason to suppose that manufacturing them out of recycled water bottles in a South East Asian sweatshop and branding them with a swooshstika makes them any less ridiculous today?

And what, pray, is a technical sandal? A sandal is not a shoe. It is that philosophical impossibility - something that is defined by a negative. A sandal is simply that which is not a shoe. The sandal is what people wear when they haven't got shoes. It's a bit of a shoe held, makeshift, to the foot. Cavemen would have worn shoes if they had them. Kalahari tribesmen would probably go for a sensible closed hiking boot if offered the opportunity and, after years of debate, theologians have finally acknowledged that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ would have worn a bench-made brogue with a commando sole and a sensible pair of calf-length lisle socks in a sober, ecclesiastical black.

You can't make a sandal 'Technical'. What the fuck is it for? Extreme ecumenical discussion? High-impact tactical folk singing? If a sandal makes the wearer look ridiculous, I can only assume that an extreme sandal is designed to make one look extremely ridiculous.

It would be odious to rehash the old jokes about the British being a workshy nation but, as the last of our noble manufacturing industries sinks into the sludge and we become a nation of call centres located in a heritage themepark, the culture of skiving has mutated into a science of expenses abuse. As their company has sprung to send them somewhere gorgeous, the natural reaction is not to enjoy it in the prescribed manner but to dress in a calculated insult to the grandeur of the surroundings and to drink the bar dry of alcopops before lurching back to the suite to be half heartedly fellated by a bored PA.

I know you are a man of passion and one easily roused to ire at poor behaviour in others so I can only say that I was glad you weren't there in person. Watching two perfect old Brighton dames, trying to have high tea while the tables around them dissolved into anarchy was profoundly shaming. They poured the lapsang in cotton gloves while some marketing trollop at a nearby table related in a loud clear voice, and to no-one in particular, how she'd been porked into pelvic trauma by a fireman on a week in Ibiza and was now trying to shift a particularly stubborn infection of the urinary tract. It was a contrast that did not show contemporary English womanhood at its best.

Re. the Beeb. I've recently taken delivery of a new digital radio. It looks refreshingly like a proper wireless and sounds brilliantly clear even in the cavern of my basement kitchen but best of all it allows me to receive one of the new digital stations, BBC7.

This comprises uninterrupted repeats of archive BBC comedy including My Word, Round the Horne, the Navy Lark, the Goons and further riches too wonderful to elucidate. I understand it is accessible via your broadband connection. I feel we have much to learn from Messrs Muir and Norden.

Yours Aye.

T

Posted by T at 03:09 PM | Permalink

Aah Firenze! The Eternal City.

Millennia of stunning architecture, bella regazzi, warm weather and the finest food go a long way to mitigate their unfortunate passion for low-cut tasselled loafers but not quite, to my mind, far enough.

Still, if a fellow can't escape to the country in the heat of summer then the city of choice must be Florence.

All is utterly ticketty boo here in Blighty. I was at a wedding this weekend - an exceding posh one somewhere near Winchester - which gave me a chance to observe the right sort at play. I've long held that the Upper classes are congenitally incapable of dancing and this event bore out my thesis.

I recall attending a Hunt Ball at Bryanston in my youth where I was first able to observe the phenomenon. Of course there was the usual excrable choice of music which would have ensured that James Brown danced like a white man but this alone couldn't explain the variety of half-baked, Dad-dancing that was going on. The chaps seemed to favour an arythmic mooch with uncoordinated shrugs and occasional spastic arm movement. The girls varied between synchronised group shuffling and, from the more histrionic, the kind of arm waving, hair tossing abandon that betokened sexual excess in a 1928 silent porn loop.

A disconsolate couple who had taken a salsa class in a vain attempt to reerect the limp stump of their relationship mournfully phoned in the tired ritual in one corner while an arseholed minor Hon. in an inherited kilt cleared a long thin strip of the floor along which he energetically cantered back and forth until he vomited his entire payload of Baileys and rubbery chicken into a rented Draecaena palm.

The staff, dragged from the surrounding villages for the event, wore borrowed nylon shirts, unsuitable hair and detached looks of arctic loathing. They mumbled amongst themselves, picked at their alarming crops of acne and looked, for all the World, as if they dreamed of Guillotines.

Fortunately, this weekend's bash was a little lighter in tone but still featured some terrifically stilted terpsichorean stylings. My favourite was an elderly chap, must have been all of seventy, in a lumpy off-the-peg of an absurd beige. He was wearing bullying glasses - the kind with bad repairs, sat-on frames, greasy lenses and with obvious deposits of dead skin cells around the nose pieces that would have made a devout and asthmatic member of the Chess Club want to bully him - beige socks and slip on shoes. All of his movement seemed to be backward from the vertical plane of his torso. He pawed at the ground in a repulsive parody of a rutting bull. His spine arched and his arms waved in the air. Imagine a charismatic cleric with Huntington's Chorea pulled through the air at incredible speed by a ligature at the umbilicus. All this, he performed around his small wife, like a squid worrying a whelk.

I pointed this entertaining vision out to the Memsahib who examined him for a moment then said, without apparent irony, "He's the top economist at King's. I think he got a Nobel Prize".

It was that sort of party.

Last night was something altogether different. As the Mem and are away for a couple of days my chum T took me out drinking to celebrate my birthday. We ended up with his friends, a smallish harem of TV girls, in a bar in Soho. By half past eight one of them had me pinned in a corner and was talking me through her latest idea.

I'm sure America hasn't escaped 'Reality TV'. Dear God, was there ever more of a misnomer? If eight semi-human members of the lower orders, locked in a house and prostituting themselves before the cameras for fifteen minutes of notoriety bears any resemblance at all to reality I'm going to neck my own weight in veterinary grade Ketamine and go out in blaze of psychosis.

This particular format featured a disfunctional couple (He slaps her around, apparently) who are separated for several weeks and kept in some luxury before being brought back together to see if they can make a go of it.

I confess I was utterly appalled. It's hard to imagine where one goes from here. Someone recently told me there was an American show where vagrants fought each other for cash in front of a baying mass of rednecks. I'm not sure if it was a joke or a social comment.

If people are making money out of this I must be in the wrong game.

Here's my pitch.

Micro-celebrities stand in a barrel of warm faeces and rats, tearing chunks out of their flesh with rusty nail clippers, weeping to camera and confessing to an entire recovered memory of being locked under the stairs and diddled by an uncle. While this is going on, lap dancers and dwarves wrestle for prizes in a pool of bat jism.

What should we call it?

T

Posted by T at 07:50 PM | Permalink

M'Learned Friend,

Sorry to hear about your dismal Midlands odyssey, just shows it's not just Grim Up North. On the subject of hotel rooms I am in one as I write, accompanying the OB&C on a business trip. Alas I must report that much as your Holiday Inn Express Hell Hole was a McHotel, the other end of the scale is going the same way.

Mr Rocco Forte has a little chain of bijou residences of which my current Florence address is one. That the myriad of glossy brochures with which the place abounds refer to the chain as 'his personal collection' of course set alarm bells ringing immediately.

One immediate problem is Mr F can't make up his mind if his 'collection' are in fact hotels or suburban department stores. Everything you see is for sale. Curtains, pillowcases, towels, pencils, hairdryers, desk, lamps, pictures and every other thing are listed in a nasty little catalogue. The tat is carefully displayed around the room to it's best advantage leaving little or no space to actually live in the place. My room is barely twelve feet across and yet there are corners I am unable to find a way to. And should you dare to move anything it is replaced the moment your back is turned. In exactly the same place. To the millimetre. No matter how inconvenient.

I'd like to say it reminds me of HM's waiters using a ruler to measure the position of the fish knives before she sits down to her morning kippers. But in that case they're not trying to sell her the plates.

I feel sorry for the poor folk who work here. I'm sure they don't enjoy being forced to behave like OCD Stepford Wives following a regime thought up by some coke-addled, ginger-goateed, brand conceptualiser from an agency in Soho that worships the satanic cult of Disney Corp.

And if that weren't enough Mr F took what was once a beautiful classic belle epoque reception hall, with the decayed elegance for which this town is rightly famous, and turned it into Debenham's homewares department with a concrete bunker coffee shop reminiscent of Freuds, Covent Garden circa 1994. As a guest if you want to sit down you have a choice of sitting amongst individually priced and strategically placed beige cushions, vases, frames et al or paying ten quid for a coffee. I'm very much afraid the place evokes a feeling of tawdry commerce and nought else.

That said it does have the enormous advantage of being not fifteen feet from the Gilli Bar, purveyors of coffee and intoxicating liquors since 1723. Though unable to elect a President who isn't stark raving mad or an 'olive oil importer' the Italians have had the good sense to pass a law limiting the amount a cafe can charge for espresso taken when standing at the bar (0.85 Euros). I am therefore able to stand at the gilded bar and indulge myself without limit. Though I have started twitching and shaking a little.

Trying to counter the effects of the espressi I was yesterday taking a medicinal Bellini (fresh peach therefore healthy) before lunch when my reverie was disturbed by the frenzied tappety-tap of electronic gadgets in the hands of Bright Young Things who were exchanging phone numbers. Though the BYT's were perfectly polite and quiet the noise from their gadgets was very disturbing. So it was that a thought struck me. Why not bring back scribbling notes on one's cuff?

Egad! I hear you cry. A Chap's Sea Island triple button starched barrel, or indeed cuff-linked double, is not for the phone number of some totty happened upon down the pub. A Gentleman would sooner brand his wrist with a white hot iron than sacrifice his mercery.

Well, apart from the fact that a Chap has no business happening upon totty down the pub, I'd say that with the feather touch of a medium-to-hard pencil, say 2H, all traces can be removed with a minimum of fuss when a chap has his shirts laundered. Imagine then the note books, notebooks, PDA's, personal organisers, Filofaxes, mobile phones, fag packets, beer mats and napkins a chap need no longer carry.

It'll be a revolution. I can see it now. Hundreds of Flaneurs (are there hundreds?) with their buttonable, though never unbuttoned, coat sleeves revealing the essential half-inch of starched cotton and the flicker of a scribbled note. Then as cuffs are shot with the natural air of insouciance that is the Flaneur's trademark there is revealed a cryptic message or lady's initials.

Inspired by my proximity to the seat of an ancient empire I was moved to note the words Strength and Honour on my own T&A pink poplin during lunch today. I recalled from some distant history lesson that Roman Centurions greeted one another with this salutation when passing on the via.

I recalled also that alone or at the head of a legion they passed always on the left, and with good reason. To wit; if remarks were overheard that could necessitate Unpleasantness a Chap would have his sword hand on the side of the offender.

Same reason why medieval castle's spiral staircases rise in a clockwise direction. Ever tried drawing your broad sword on the inside of a narrow stone spiral staircase going upwards? - Tricky.

Same reason why we drive our motor cars on the left. If there's any argy-bargy you can roll down your window and offer your right hand with the correct two-fingered salute.

With two-thousand years of correct behaviour as an example you'd think more of our friends would do the same. Our American friends did until the end of the eighteenth century when a chap started building covered wagons with the brake on the left hand side, thus forcing the drivers to sit on the left and pass on the right. It caught on across the country and from there they left the good sense of the Romans behind.

So why then do our friends in Europe all drive on the wrong side too? Well the best I can come up with is that the Germans, with whom we've seldom agreed, did it to spite us. And the French and Italians did it because they've never really been able to say no to the Germans for very long.

And to think it was Italy that gave us the Romans.

Yours at the feet of David with his 2H poised,

S

Posted by S at 08:57 PM | Permalink