Get your legs lagged lads! It’s winter!
WHETHER you’re a postman or The Pope, we all have our little individual quirks, or as my old aunties use to say when I was a nipper… “Funny little ways”. Take the gambler who lived and breathed horse racing to such an extent, when he wasn’t in the bookies or attending meetings at Chepstow, Kempton Park and many others around the country, or watching Channel Four racing, he would spend hours listening to audios of horse’s hooves thundering around the course as they headed towards the winning post.
He was a man who loved the sound of his own vice.
Gambling on horses is also an obsession and regular readers will be aware that one of my obsessions this time of year is to comment about something I find baffling as well as ludicrous.
I’m talking about men who, apparently calendar-less, don’t realise it’s December, so swagger around displaying their hairy legs to the world on freezing cold winter days, wearing crumpled shorts.
Yet, inexplicably, they feel the need to wear woolly hats to keep their heads warm!
And they say variety is dead! This year there are more of them on the windswept icy streets than ever before.
This might well be because these ‘We don’t feel the cold’ macho lads have spent too much time watching their football heroes in shorts kicking a ball around in Qatar and want to emulate them.
If that’s so, they obviously don’t understand the difficult concept of…
■ Qatar in December = Very Hot.
■ Great Britain in December = Very Cold.
But as they’re found on the streets every year, proudly baring their knobbly knees to anyone who can’t avoid seeing them, I could be wrong regarding the World Cup angle.
As an added ‘bonus’ this year I’ve spotted two middle-aged men in shorts who either had dozens of tattoos plastered all over their legs or were prone to the worst varicose veins in history.
The vain leading the vein … you might say. In the same way the Warden in Dad’s Army used to go around shouting “Put that light out!”, I think between November and March we should have an army of whistlewielding wardens going around shouting… “Put some trousers on!”