Comfy

The last few weeks have been a glorious time of year for clothing. Not in terms of the high-street winter collections and all that bumf. But due to the marvellous array of excuses there are to wear joyfully silly bundles of germents that prioritise absolute comfort over even the vaguest shred of presentability.

Men’s wardrobes are full of items that long ago fell out of fashionable favour, each armed with an excuse for it’s continued presence. Jeans bereft of knees and back pockets, kept on the pretence of being something to wear when painting the living room. T shirts retained to wear in bed during cold spells. Guy Browning once brilliantly said that autumn allows you to wear whatever you fancy simply by making the garments in question your gardening clothes – a transformation accomplished simply by putting a spot of mud on them.

While admittedly there may then be pressure to bring about some form of visible change to your garden if you go down the latter route, there are still other options. For Hallowe’en you can wear whatever the hell you want, for example, just by adding a few cursory embellishments and calling it a costume. Gloriously comfy but admittedly raggedy jeans go with anything, for example. Paint yourself green and you’re the incredible hulk. Accessorise with cheap lager and you’re a tramp. Add a hat and you’re a pirate. Although that’s then one more item of daft clothing cluttering up the place.

Christmas is a magical season for lovely, hideous jumpers; big cosy affairs the size of haystacks that feel like a portable hug for your torso, but make your eyes feel like they’re vomiting clowns.

Wear two at once and you’ll be lucky to be able to turn your head independently from your torso, and thankfully won’t be able to look down at the patterns you’ve adorned yourself with. But damn you’ll be snug. And if anyone has the temerity to question your sartorial selection, you can simply say it’s your Christmas jumper, and they have to accept it – it’s the law.

Even beyond Christmas, the falling temperatures allow you to continue layering up in all manner of floppy woollen nonsense all in the name of cost-effective personal heating. Women do this too, mind; that’s not a house coat, you’re wearing your dressing gown. And good for you, make the most of it. Right now you could even sit wrapped in a duvet and people wouldn’t seem to mind.

I say we really try and push the envelope. Wearing scarves around the office seems acceptable, and so does donning fingerless gloves. But how about a false beard? The insulative properties have got to be pretty good, especially around those chill-prone cheekbones. And it doesn’t have to be made of real hair or anything.

I’m not going to make too much of this, as I believe this is an idea that speaks for itself, and I fail to see how you can’t already be pondering the cosmetic aspects of it: What colour would I choose? Would of the myriad beard styles would I opt for? And whether man or woman, you will also be thinking; Will it suit me?

Give it a go and get aboard the beard train. You’ll be warm. And a trend-setter. before you know it it’ll be the cornerstone of the latest high-street winter collections and all that bumf. And it’ll go really well with that pirate hat you bought at Hallowe’en.

Daily Disappointment

I can’t work out which are more rubbish: those YouTube photo-a-day montages or the people that create them.

The whole point of time-lapse is that it lets you see a great change in something that has in the real world taken a lengthy period of time, but played out at a significantly increased speed. It’s nothing without an element of actual progress. No-one’s going to watch a film of a stage where sod all is constructed, or a video of a city at night without the head-lamped traffic tearing up the roads like psychotic glo-sticks and the glaring moon rolling across the sky in ten seconds flat.

So why the hell do these people make such long-term commitments to charting the change in their appearances, and then completely fail, over the next decade or whatever, to make any effort to actually make these visual alterations? These people rarely even splash out on a radically different pullover for crying out loud. Instead they create damningly mind-numbing video confirmation of their own conservative unwillingness to accept the slightest element of risk into their lives.

If you’re going to do one of these time-lapse things, and record how your appearance changes, you’d better be prepared to actually make some sodding changes. Blokes (for it’s mainly the masculine half of the globe who make these things) – if at no point in the future do you intend on even growing a beard, piss off right now. To make a truly great video, ideally, you should never shave ever again. Go wild, play about a bit. Unless you stray into the realms of tatoos, or perhaps eating your own ears, it won’t last forever.

The problem of course is that by the time most people get round to doing these sorts of things, they’re in at least their late twenties and have already been through the traditional teenage period of excessive and devoted experimentation. And they’re unlikely to go through all that again. More than likely they’ve analysed all of the data offered to them by these formative years of indentity jiggery-pokery, and conclusively selected the facial fingerprint that’s going to serve them for as long as they’ve got the hairline and cheekbones to maintain it. And probably a few years after that as well.

Any adult going through serious re-invention is either on the witness protection programme, in the grip of a mid-life crisis, or an ageing pop star. Sadly, while any of these people undergoing the photo-a-day treatment would result in a truly spectacular slice of video, unfortunately none of them seem to do it. 

Now folk in witness protection I can understand, but surely a project based on such vain self-promotion is perfect for a fading celeb gesticulating desperately at the public eye? And central to any half-decent mid-life crisis is the feeling that you’ve wasted the best part of your brief existence - who’s more likely to experience such suspicions than someone who’s taken a polaroid of themself every bloody morning for a decade or two? And as always, whilst not once making any bloody changes to their appearance, thereby negating the entire process.

Seriously, you’d think that at one point during the prescribed time period, they’d at least be invited to a fancy-dress party or something? And no matter who you are, who doesn’t enjoy the odd beard now and then?