Why do British men wear socks and jackets during the intense heat? After years of sweating through summer parties, I’ve made a breakthrough in this heat-wave year, dispensing with socks, jacket and tie. I’m all for formality, but not in the face of 80-degree heat and torrents of sweat.
Still, I feel like a pariah in my new sockless, jacketless incarnation. A friend berated me at a steaming hot party earlier this month for not wearing a jacket.
I was the only jacketless man at the party and I did feel like a fish out of water surrounded by the fully clothed. Still, I wasn’t a sweating fish out of water.
Why do jackets, ties and socks persist in the heat? There’s an atavistic memory of traditional custom and fashion – combined with a last-gasp attempt to counter the anything-goes, full-on, near-complete nakedness that prevails beyond the walls of the party. There’s also that certain kind of British Clubman Male who takes great delight in telling people off for breaking pointless rules.
It’s only in Britain that this dogged approach to summerwear persists. Italians and French have long looked smart without bothering with socks. The photographer Dafydd Jones tells me that one of his most popular pictures in France was taken at the Magdalene College Ball in Cambridge in 1997. It shows a trouserless ballgoer jumping off a bridge into the Cam, watched by undergraduates in white tie.
It’s adored by the French, not because he’s half-naked or because of the Brideshead element – but because the man still insists on keeping his socks on for his jump. An Englishman is all too happy to remove his trousers. His socks? Never.
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I quite understand why President Trump needed maximum security for his trip to Britain last week.
Four American presidents have been shot dead; more than 30 murder attempts have been made on presidents. Given there have only been 44 presidents, that makes for a high risk of assassination. (Yes, Trump is called the 45th president, but Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms, meaning he’s treated as the 22nd and 24th incumbent).
But why does it take so long to remove the massive security apparatus for Trump’s trip? On Saturday and Sunday – long after Trump had flown to Scotland – Regent’s Park was still wrapped in security fences. Trump stayed at the American ambassador’s home in the park on Thursday night. And yet, still on Sunday evening, the wire-mesh fences snaked through the park, slicing right across the Regent’s Park lake.
It was a classic example of “security, health and safety creep”. Take a genuine threat – the possible assassination of an American president – and use it to justify over-extended, pointless obstruction of people’s lives.
You see it everywhere. It’s there at my local tennis courts in Islington: closed after a brief shower, supposedly for health and safety reasons; in fact, so that the employees can do less work.
It’s there at railway stations: in the idiotic “See it. Say it. Sorted” public announcements; in platform notices telling you not to run for trains you’re in a desperate hurry to catch. Under the guise of public safety, station employees can give blanket, pre-recorded, over-amplified warnings on the PA, and never have to deal with the public in an ad hoc, thoughtful way that requires more work.
……
Ripping out Victorian pews from churches has long agonised me. And what horrors they are being replaced with.
Church-crawling in Oxfordshire recently, I visited St Kenelm’s, Enstone, the charming medieval church where Theresa May’s father, Hubert Brasier, was vicar from 1959 to 1971. The Prime Minister grew up in the village. David Cameron, whose country house is a few miles away, is a regular worshipper at the church, too.
The Victorian pews have been torn out, replaced by spongy, brown, wooden chairs straight out of a doctor’s waiting room. There’s a suggestion that these in turn might be replaced by spindly, chrome chairs; an example lurks by the chancel. Not only are these metal chairs hideous, they also reflect the light and stand out garishly in an ancient church of unreflective timber and stone.
St Kenelm’s accidentally provides a solution to the whole vexed question of pews. Towards the back of the nave, some old Victorian pews survive, detached from the floor and now freestanding. They can be moved to the side of the church when the nave is cleared for meetings and celebrations.
Yes, the pews are quite difficult to move. But surely it’s not beyond the wit of man to devise a set of pew-carrying wheels to move them around easily. Many of the Oxfordshire churches I saw still have their old, wheeled biers to carry coffins. Time to invent a pew bier.
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