Daydreaming about trousers

The seamstress knelt at my feet and emitted a little gasp. ‘‘Would it be easier for you,’’ I said, ‘‘if I stood on a chair?’’ She shook her head but said nothing, because of a fan of pins held between her lips like the dorsal fin of a perch. In silence she went at the hem of my trousers, straightening, folding, pinning.

There is a pleasure in surrendering to expertise. While the seamstress worked, I sank into a trouser reverie.

I had brought her four pairs to shorten because of a delusion among trouser-manufacturers that as one gets fatter one gets taller. It isn’t so. The length of my legs was settled 40 years ago. The girth of my waist wasn’t.

These days I have the silhouette of one of those prehistoric figures that archaeologists know as fertility symbols. And any trousers that fit nicely over rump and gut are always several inches too long.

Now, like any well-dressed man about town, I want the front of my trouser cuff to rest lightly, with perhaps the merest hint of a ripple, on the upper of my lime-green Croc. But, as I said to the seamstress while she was pinning, if there’s a choice between having them a little too long or a little too short I’ll choose too long.

Too-short trousers can be shrugged down on the hips but they will always ride back up. And that half inch of missing cloth, that band of exposed ankle, sings a song of soup for one, missing mother and dandruff like confetti.

The slightly-too-long trouser, on the other hand, can be endearing. It suggests the boy who has yet to grow to man’s estate. In the bagged and rumpled cloth there is a note of Charlie Chaplin, the loveable underdog, or of a hero of mine, Laurie Lee.

In 1934, at the age of 19, Lee walked out of his childhood village and headed for London. He carried a fiddle and a tent and a piece of cheese.

At Southampton he went into a booth to have a photograph taken that was developed in a bucket in less than a minute. The picture is one of the great romantic images of youthful fantasy, of just going for the sake of going.

In Lee’s own words it shows a youth with ‘‘eggshell eyes, unhatched and unrecognisable’’ wearing ‘‘a sloppy slouch hat, heavy boots, baggy trousers’’.

The trousers I am having shortened are elastic-waisted leisurewear. There was no elastic-waisted leisurewear in 1934. Nor was there in 1895 when my grandfather was born. Throughout his life my grandfather’s idea of leisurewear was to take his tie off. And both my grandfather and Lee held their trousers up with braces.

No-one today wears braces except for clowns, a few anachronisms who’ll write to me in protest, and young people wanting to be noticed. I was once a young person wanting to be noticed and I wore braces when teaching in Canada.

But I soon learned not to call them braces. In North America the word braces was reserved for those orthodontic devices that, in the 1980s, became status symbols among the children of the professional classes. The most expensive involved a halo of metal outside the head and cost the same as a small car.

The kids called my braces suspenders. I tried to explain that suspenders were the elaborate contraptions that women of my mother’s generation wore to hold up stockings and which men, typically, turned into items of erotic fetish that were indispensable to . . .

‘‘All done,’’ said the seamstress.

‘‘Thank you very much,’’ I said.