I don’t recommend dressing like this at work ... even if it ain’t half hot

WILL beards be removed as we approach the end of lockdown? Will those who have been working from home or on furlough, ditch tracksuits and trainers, send their suits to the cleaners and shine their shoes?

Or will this be the start of a new age of relaxed business and office practice? It’s been tried before, of course.

IT companies love casual attire as long as minds are sharp, but their staff are in an isolated world of their own and communicate by algorithms rather than face-to-face or over a business lunch.

And whatever happened to dressdown Friday? Did people take it too literally and started the weekend at lunchtime and went to the pub?

I’m not sure it ever happened at all except in London. My mate Wimps never dressed down when he went to David Browns Engineering on a Friday. He still wore overalls and steel capped boots.

When I started in journalism, jacket and tie, smart trousers and smart shoes were necessary. In Uganda as a subeditor, I switched to khaki shorts, khaki knee socks, desert boots and a white short sleeved shirt with a pocket for cigarettes. Didn’t I look a Bobby Dazzler?

One long hot summer years ago, I thought a climate change in social attitudes might be happening. Young ladies walked the streets in scanty attire that would have turned heads in Magaluf, and blokes discarded shirts in crowded pubs as they raised their arms to get served. At my height, it almost turned me vegan.

I decided to show them the proper, old colonial way, to survive the heat, and donned my khaki Ugandan outfit and strode into the Examiner office like Robert Redford in Out of Africa. I should have known better. My colleagues regaled me with cries of Gunner Sugden, asked where Gloria was and what time was the next concert party. Oh dear, how sad, never mind. I never tried it again.

Which is why I shall wait this time round to see if Covid really has changed expectations of sartorial decorum before I take the plunge again as an instigator of fashion.