Two Chaps Talking

Dear Boy,

Spring and all that. When a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove.

I suppose I should be filled with vernal joys and sap-rising urges but, to be candid, I find the arrival of the first sunny day in Blighty spiritually disheartening.

Ask most Chaps and they'll talk about walking in parks, playing tennis and young women wearing less clothes. This, I fear, is where my problems start. I would be all for the strappy sandal on the well turned ankle and the healthy glow of taught, tanned flesh. Tragically this is London. At the first sign of sun, women take entire leave of their senses and, more particularly, taste, hauling from some benighted corner of the wardrobe, scraps of garment that would not look amiss on a topless carwash operative in Tennessee or a Bangkok bar girl. This is dragged over the rounded extremities of a body that has seen nowt but the light of bar, office and Tube for a clear eight months and has been fed on a diet of Chardonnay, fags and M&S prawn sandwiches since puberty. If one is charitable one can speak of pale alabaster and Rubenesque curves but, and here my art history may be a little rusty, I am fairly sure Rubens never did anything called 'Odalisque with gray-washed bra straps cutting into lobster pink shoulder, visible and fraying thong in tattooed builder's cleavage, chipped toenails and cornplasters crammed into last years sandals'.

Tragically, last Summer saw a fashion for what I can only describe as trailer-trash chic - a kind of tacky, 1980 Marbella meets Daisy Duke, knowing, post-modern, post-feminist, sluttiness. An intervening winter has not been kind. Any sense of irony blew away with the leaves of autumn or melted with the last slush of the Christmas party season. It looks like few people took the opportunity to clear the wardrobe and, in consequence, even Bond St looks like a Jerry Springer audience on a hot day at an Alabama hog roast.

I have alway preferred to view Englishwomen at the end of the Summer. They are aglow with health for a few evanescent days before plunging into the layers of winter wrapping in which they've always looked their fetching best.

It's not as if men fare any better. The first visit to the park brings an early sighting of, that most London of phenomena 'The Fat Man with the £300 Raquet'. With no appreciable warmup, he will throw himself into a championship level game on the first decent day of the year and, if his heart holds up, will have destroyed his groin, hamstring, elbow, rotator cuff and sense of dignity by the second set. He will retire sufficiently injured to sit out the rest of the season in the bar and the next time he holds a racquet will be when he buys next year's.

There are also, of course, the runners. There is little I can say about how undignified this can be as I've been known to try it myself. Suffice it to say, a chap likes to think that something may slap against his stomach as he runs in loose shorts - it is demeaning to discover that it's his breasts.

Parks, of course, are simply impossible. They are a solid terrine of sweating ghastliness throughout the season. The only notable exceptions are the private squares which are never, ever used as those with access are at their place in the country on any suitably warm occasion.

To compound the awfulness of the season, we're trying to move house. The newspapers, like the rest of the English, are obsessed with property prices, predicting alternate boom and bust on three minute cycles. The only thing I've worked out for sure is that, though it's invariably a buyer's market when you're selling and a seller's market when you're buying - it's always an estate agent's market.

Finally, in a recent poll, a sizeable majority of English people expressed a desire for an identity card system which would be more draconian in its powers than any other in the democratic world. In the same poll they also averred, almost unanimously, that they did not believe that the government would be able to keep the information held in a secure fashion.

A commentator on Radio Four opined thus...

"It just shows how pathetic the English really are. If there was a fascist coup they'd queue up to get in the trucks... as long as they had the Mail on Sunday and Harry bloody Potter".

'Right ho! Then bring me my whangee, my yellowest shoes, and the old green Homburg. I'm going into the park to do pastoral dances'.

Toodle Pip

T