Summer Holidays 2010 2: Clothes Maketh the Man

Why is it that whenever the sun peeps from behind the clouds for about ten seconds people start showing the weirdest looking body parts? The women look strange enough, with skirts too short too befit their age and fat bulging between those skirts and too tight t-shirts, but it’s the men that really make you wonder. Is there anything worse than a man in shorts? It doesn’t matter if the men are skinny or fat, shorts simply are the death of any relationship. It’s even worse when the man in question is wearing sandals and grey woolly socks as well or, God forbid, flipflops.


I’m in England, the country of Messrs Darcy and Rochester, the area where Heathcliffs can still roam the moors and where we can dream of Robin Hood and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Have you ever wondered why women still secretly dream about men like that? It’s because they never wore shorts and sandals. Pre-1900 man really knew what women wanted and it was certainly not that. Ever wondered why men like wearing uniforms, especially the colourful ones they wore at battles like Waterloo? It was because a good uniform covers up all the flaws and makes even the scrawniest man with the wonkiest knees look to die for.

Now it would be going a bit far to start wishing men would start running around in uniforms like that again, but looking at themselves in a mirror before leaving the house in the morning would be rather considerate to their fellow human beings. Don’t these men have wives who tell them their sense of dress is totally off?

Although, come to think of it, their wives may be on to something, because, let’s be honest, if you had your own Mr Darcy at home, would you want other women to know about that? Wouldn’t you actually send him out in shorts and sandals yourself so no other woman would look at him twice?

I’m sitting in my car in a car park near the M4 motorway on my way to Wiltshire, sipping a cappuccino from a big cardboard mug looking at the men going by. I haven’t seen a Darcy or Rochester yet, but who knows, the holidays have only just begun ….