I DON’T go into the city centre very often these days, since the vast majority of my day-to-day requirements are met by the combination of superstores and various other retail chains which tend to locate themselves on the edge of town. Perhaps most significantly, they offer free parking, whilst a similar trip by car to W.H. Smith in the city centre can literally double the price of a simple purchase like a Sudoku puzzle-book, just by virtue of the extortionate car-parking charges.
On those rare occasions when I do venture from my suburban home into the very jaws of Hades, using my pensioner’s bus pass, I’m always astonished to see just how many men wear short trousers these days. Not just down on the beach, where such a relaxed approach might be understandable, but right here in the city, where I would have expected more men to adopt what I have always regarded as adult clothing.
In fact, the very subject of what is defined as ‘adult clothing’ is now a huge debate in its own right. I can’t help but notice that, of those adults who do wear long trousers these days, quite a substantial majority are women.
It’s amusing to recall my own childhood back in the 1950s and ‘60s, when I pestered my mother to put me in long trousers, imploring her with the exaggeration that ‘all the other boys in my class wear long trousers’.
Being in long trousers was probably the single most unambiguous symbol that one had left behind one’s childhood and become a young man. In recent years, the very idea of adult masculinity having any value in and of itself has been so ridiculed and condemned by feminism that maybe this fashion for shorts is a subliminal attempt by men to ingratiate themselves with their womenfolk.
The real irony of all this is that women do not feel this need to apologise for their existence and so have become literally ‘the ones who wear the trousers’.
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