The fashion issue...

Today was spent being taught further intricacies of trade floor telephony. The guy doing the teaching was particularly distracting, due to looking and sounding very similar to Nigel Planer - Neil from “The Young Ones”, if you didn’t realise… If you don’t know “The Young Ones”, I probably can’t help you much, but look it up on YouTube – you’ll probably find something appropriate.

This was an unusual similarity, given that Nigel Planer is known for playing a hippie with characteristically long hair, whereas the trainer was comically bald – not merely hairless, but with a bald “dome” surrounded by a proud ruff of immaculately pruned hair – conjuring an overall effect that was reminiscent of an ostrich egg laid in a thrush’s nest.

This led me to the arguably inevitable conclusion of “WTF?” - or an internalised, and rather more eloquent equivalent, at least. Aside from the obvious consideration that he should really have been wearing a 2 foot wig, I also arrived at the rather more practical thought that he’d have been better off just losing the lot and pretending it was 100% by choice, rather than 50% fate and 50% deliberate.

I do sometimes wonder what neuron fails to fire in some people’s brains and leads them to feel that it’s a good idea to create such a disastrous impression. I mean – we all wear things that maybe don’t suit us, and even sometimes make a deliberate statement that is more zero than hero. My wife likes to describe such spectacular sartorial ejecta in womenswear as “Man-Repelling” – borrowed from a blog that she follows quite religiously – although I feel that we don’t need to be so gender-specific when identifying fashion whoopsies.

Another example of a similar fail when sweepingly and prejudicially writing off an entire subsection of the population – who in my defence are often genuinely obsessive and self-aggrandising – is cyclists. As a non-driver myself, I’m probably on shaky ground by targeting my natural allies, but REALLY? What makes anyone decide that it’s a good idea to package up their – ahem! – “package” into some hideously deformed, spandex moose-knuckle of such throbbing obviousness that it looks like it was caused by repeated assaults from an electrified saddle whilst cycling over cobbles? Worse still is an almost equally common partiality for radioactively neon colour schemes in which to perform such genital strangulation. The overall effect is one of pain, lunacy and revulsion that in a bygone era would have been peculiar to Bedlam. And sadly, it’s usually men that choose to do this – the specific half of the population that definitely don’t suit this look.

…And breathe…

Actually, I'm hardly a fashionista (or should that be fashionisto?) myself... Anywho. I failed, yet again, to produce any musical offerings. I learned some law, but not as much as I would have liked. I did, however, write a blog post. See above.