Once Works Well was pure technology. Now it seeks merely to divert.
Pansy subjects - Verse! Opera! Domestic trivia! - are now commonplace.
The 300-word limit for posts is retained. The ego is enlarged

Friday 7 August 2009

Cheap clothes can embarrass you

Query: Does this post touch on one of those hard-wired but rarely admitted differences between men and women?

This morning I discarded a pair of underpants - a gift from my mother-in-law, dead these last seven years, so they were possibly ten or twelve years old. Unlike the rest, these pants were made of silk. Presumably more expensive than cotton but, it seems, more durable.

I only buy cheap clothing - other than for ski-ing. I conclude that good clothes wear out while cheap clothes disintegrate. The prelude to this disintegration is when long lengths of thread wrap themselves round my buttocks, calves or elbows. Cheap clothes are cheaply stitched. The so-called track-suit I wear when cycling in the shed (qv) came from Primark and cost £12. Much thread has already detached itself and no doubt, one of these days, I shall walk, embarrassed, from the shed back to the house.

I briefly abrogated the cheap-clothing policy when I bought a Savile Row suit prior to crossing the Atlantic and presenting myself as an archetypal Englishman at job interviews. This suit neither wore out nor disintegrated; I simply got too fat to wear it. The fact that the drainpipe trousers were eventually fifteen years out of fashion didn’t worry me.

I assume that all clothes, cheap or expensive, are machine stitched. So why do some machines do the job while others don’t? Then there’s the matter of buttons. If I were more interested in clothes (Chinos are the only trousers!) I’d have given all this more thought. Luckily the people who read this blog do just that and I await their soothing answers.