If I had known that it would cause me this much angst I might never done it. It was a foolish step anyway for a man of my age. Like trying to dance to drum’n’bass at your daughter’s birthday party. Or pretending that you find Graham Norton funny. But I can’t turn back the clock now. Too many people know. Pride is at stake. So is my new, “hip” image. For better or worse, I’m stuck with it.
And “it” is? A year ago I decided I would never wear a tie again — except when attending state funerals or lunching in the stuffier London clubs (the experience is virtually interchangeable in any case). The thing is, I never saw the move as some momentous life-change. I am quite happy for the rest of my sartorial ensemble to be as eternally fixed as the formula for Marmite. I haven’t swopped my black lace-ups for designer trainers. I still wear what my children incredulously call “granny cardigans”. True, I do have a hooded jumper, of the sort that apparently causes fear and loathing in shopping malls throughout the realm. But only because it keeps my ears warm when I put out the rubbish.
No, it’s just ties that I want out of my life. And my reasons are eminently practical. First, ties are utterly pointless, absurdly overpriced objects. They may just about be tolerable as part of a school uniform (though my wife reminds me that, even in the early 1970s, the North London grammar school she attended was the scene of a celebrated anti-tie pupils’ revolt — led by a mouthy sixth-former called Peter Mandelson). But for adults they should surely have been made extinct at around the same time as spats and trilbys.
Especially for adults, like me, who have a severe congenital condition — I think the doctors call it slurpus soupus — which ensures that whenever we aim liquid in the general direction of the mouth, a fair proportion of it seems to end up dripping down the chin. I must have spent half my life trying to rinse unsightly stains off ties, only for the damn things to end up looking like those frayed bits of rope that get washed up on beaches.
Nor can I relate to that whole “badge of affiliation” thing about ties that clearly excites so many middle-aged men. I don’t belong to the MCC, or any other posh clique that requires you to proclaim your loyalty to the brotherhood by wrapping your neck with a vertical zebra-crossing in hideously clashing primary colours. I have no old regiment. I have an old school, but mercifully it didn’t produce the sort of old boys who flaunt old school ties. Or if it did, I’ve managed to avoid them for 35 years. Funnily enough, I do possess an old college tie, sent to me “by the Master and Fellows in gratitude” after I donated some dosh to their appeal. Since I only sent 30 quid, and the tie seemed to be made of silk, I imagine that the college bursar must have netted all of 50p on the deal. But I would never dream of wearing it. A ghastly mauve-striped concoction, it looks like something Bridget Riley might have knocked up in a blackout.
But the real reason I expelled ties from my life was to avoid the recurring irritation of having an item of clothing that one had selected at random, before dawn, in the dark, half asleep, somehow interpreted as a revealing “statement” about one’s mood, personality, availability or intent. “Wow, bright pink with green polka dots,” someone would exclaim, as I staggered into the office on a grim Monday morning. “My, my! Who are you trying to dazzle?”
Unfortunately, I seem only to have replaced one irritation with another. Now I have the vexation of people reading things into my tie-less condition that I never intended. Take those glamorous West End first nights that I am sometimes required to attend. Wear a tie and I feel that I’m aligning myself with the corporate bigwigs and their clients flaunting their Armani in the expensive seats. Go tie-less, however, and people think I am pretending to be some trendy young dude who delights in flouting petit bourgeois rules. But what if I don’t want to send any sort of subliminal sociological signal at all? What if I just don’t like ties?
The real problem, of course, is that we are in one of those betwixt-and-between eras of total sartorial confusion. For most of the 20th century the tie was de rigueur in all professional and nearly all social situations. (I love those photographs of 1920s steelworkers and miners going off to their grim, filthy workplaces in jackets and ties.) Now conventions have been partly relaxed, but no one seems entirely sure by how much, or where the old rules still apply. Or, for that matter, just how rich, famous and grand you need to be to get away with wearing what the hell you like, wherever you like. What this all means, I’m afraid, is that for the first time in a hundred years, we blokes actually have to think about what we are going to wear. It’s an appalling situation.
Of course it was worse in the 19th century. After all, that was the age when men gradually moved from tights into trousers. Imagine what a wally you felt if you got that dress-code wrong. But the Great Tie Dilemma is bad enough. I just hope I live to see the accursed garment permanently consigned to history. But if I don’t, this is my last request. No ties to be worn at my funeral, please. Especially by me.
After you with the demolition ball
Those wacky Tory “intellectuals” aren’t short of eye-popping ideas, are they? The latest from Policy Exchange, the Conservative “think” tank, is a scheme that would give members of the public the chance to blacklist buildings they didn’t like. Whether publicly owned or in private hands, the buildings would then be demolished by government decree. Wonderful! Yet more fascistic power for the nanny-state. The only surprise is that Labour didn’t think of it first.
Still, there are compensations. I’ve always considered that pseudo-Gothic monstrosity by the River Thames at Westminster — the one with the big clock on top — to be a blot on the landscape. When Obergruppenführer Cameron comes to power I shall certainly vote to have that knocked down. The only thing I can’t decide is whether the lunatics should be let out of the asylum first.
Spermutations
Congratulations to Dr Tim Karr, of the University of Bath, who announced last week that he has discovered and catalogued no fewer than 381 different proteins in yer average human sperm. He also supplied what will surely be one of the quotes of the year. “We know very little about what is in a sperm, which probably explains why we don’t understand sex,” the scientist tells us.
Ah, so that’s the trick, is it? After 35 years of amateurish fumbling between the sheets, I can now advance with joyous confidence into the higher realms of rumpy-pumpy — just as long as I keep a list of Dr Karr’s 381 proteins on the bedside table for quick reference.
I just hope that, in the heat of the moment, I can find my reading glasses.
