IT WAS a sight to gladden the most jaded eye. Summer sun beamed on a busy city centre. I stood outside a department store in the pedestrian precinct, doing what chaps do for countless hours: waiting for their burdz.
I'd time to look around. These
days, I breathe deep and slow, which makes me less prone to panicking. Consequently, I was able to scan the masses first one way, then the other, without fearing they were going to turn on me as the sacrifical victim for a feast. At first, I thought my eyes deceived me. It was some kind of optical wish-fulfilment, an illusion to make life more bearable.
But it was true. Everything I was seeing was real. And here was the crux: on a warm, sunny day in a busy street, everybody – and I mean everybody – was wearing a jacket. It was as if the halcyon values of the 1950s had returned. What was even more pleasing was that not one person was wearing shorts. It was uncanny, incredible.
I was in Dublin. You may say: "Ah, that would explain it." But Dublin is a vibrant, cosmopolitan and prosperous place. Its shops are full of the latest fashions. Its bars are trendy, with plenty of places to sit outside, for those who like traffic-fumes and urban dust. Perhaps, like me, the Dubliners did not wear shorts because they were Celts with potato-coloured legs. But, whatever the reason, these people were beautiful. I felt like kissing every one of them.
We walked into other parts of the city centre, and I kept scanning one way then the other: still no shorts. Until, of course, a cyclist spoiled it. Cyclists ruin everything: urban baldies in shades spraying sweat on the leiges from their perverse, self-righteous exertions.
But Dublin was not as cycling-mad as Edinburgh. The few that were around ten-ded to annoy citizens by wheeling along the pavements, even where lanes were provided for them on the roads (paid for by the motorist).
A city free of cyclists and shorts would be a dream, a return to the days of decency. In Edinburgh, the shorts phenomenon first appeared among the massive English population, waddling hither and thither in their Enid Blyton duds. The phenomenon reflected psychological distress at the post-war decline of "Great Britain".
The Scotch soon followed suit, as it were, but so did citizens of other nations. England is a country much admired throughout the world, and many people – always excepting the French – ape her mores. Americans, Germans and so forth soon took to wearing shorts, too. I remember being disappointed in Bergen: there, with teutonic conformity, absolutely everyone wore shorts. An essentially imitative people, a trait they share with the Japanese (both peoples are descended from Vikings and still love killing whales), the Norwegians never get anything sophisticated quite right. They probably turn up to funerals in shorts. I am generalising, but it is such fun.
English, or British, fashion sense is often derided by the sophisticated, but its influence has always been deep. Glib people defer to Italy, but this is a hideous mistake. In matters of couture, the Italians merely take British designs and refine them. When British explorers first discovered Italy in 1892, the natives were still pootering aboot in pantaloons and codpieces from the Shakespearean era.
Their cuisine consisted of little more than pasta and ketchup and, in the hot afternoon sun, they indulged their passion for "siesta" (in English, "laziness"). But I digress. Back to Dublin and, despite Irish independence, a curious Britishness still infests the place. This has been caused by globalisation. In the hotel breakfast bar, giant television screens showing Sky News featured the caption "For Queen and country" for ages during some typically creepy media eulogy of the British military.
The city of Dublin itself is a curious mixture of Glasgow and London. In the corner outside Trinity College, Piccadilly-style crowds stream towards you, the faces betraying tensely intense thought, mainly of the future. They are not "mindful", as the New Age (rapidly becoming Old Age) people say, of the present. But the craic, a word I dislike, is Glaswegian. Here, people actually speak to you and seem uniformly friendly. That cannot be correct, of course. All generalisations are basically true statements full of mistakes. But one deals with impressions not facts, as the former ring more truly.
In Dublin, whenever you need cheering up, you just need to look at people's legs or buttocks. No shorts. It may have been a blip, of course. Early summer this year across Britain and Ireland has been prone to sudden showers and chills. Hence, the jackets and long trousers. But one likes to think it was a permanent state, a little bit of the 1950s pickled deliciously in aspic.
The full article contains 822 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
