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.

Vast swathes of redundant plastic half-bricks

When I was a kid, I assumed that as you got older, you got more qualified to work, that experience was key. Now I work in new media, it’s almost the opposite – it’s an industry of youth. Each generation grows up with a new generation of technology and uses it intrinsically in a way their parents struggle to, because they’ve never known a world without these new devices.

It’s like trying to imagine life before light bulbs, or umbrellas, or Tom and Jerry cartoons. You can’t – they’re now an essential part of our cultural landscape, and you accept their existence as unquestioningly as you do your own elbows.

The new technology that abounded when I was a kid was VHS; taping programmes off the telly and more importantly, playing both home-recorded material and shop-bought films whenever you fancied.

While it’s now obsolete, VHS was accepted extensively, with most families establishing enormous libraries of movies. Their obsolescence has therefore resulted in vast swathes of redundant plastic half-bricks, taking up more collective loft-space than both the nation’s rowing machines and Encyclopaedia Britannicas combined.

UK branches of Oxfam and the PDSA are right now bursting with extensive collections of tapes - most of them containing episodes of ‘Friends’ – for you to peruse. And then not buy.

But as long as they still work, no-one seems to be able to just throw the tapes away because people still value the contents of those clunky cassettes.

I love that we still have respect for this entertaining data in one form or another, and that through the media that have replaced VHS, it’s becoming increasingly easy to preserve our own creativity and pass it on. Because if you look back through generations, our grandparents had faded photographs and journals, our parents have cassette tapes and short films, whereas we have all of the above now digitally restored, plus films and photos and audio from a wealth of portable devices, along with digital illustrations, blogs, animations, and all manner of other jiggery pokery.

And as easy as it is to copy, to backup, to duplicate and dispose of, we still seem keen to preserve the bits we’ve already got, ensuring that they’ll still be available for future generations to flick through in attic-dwelling cardboard boxes and charity shops. And then not watch.