I wanted to move up to denim, but I got short shrift
THE April sunshine brings the first hint of summer and out of the trousers drawer I extract the faded pair of denim shorts which make their annual appearance around this time of year. Be warned, should you be near the coast.
I am always slightly hesitant about donning the shorts. I know men who wear shorts as a matter of course. Such men are usually younger than your correspondent and thus have no memory of experiencing a short trousers spell in their lives.
Let me explain. Octoganerians such as myself grew up when wearing short trousers was part of a young man’s necessary rite of passage, but one which the longer it lasted, the more it was disliked.
To continue wearing short trousers after a certain age, was a symbol of still being a child and undeveloped. My best mate was called Dave Coot and he was in long trousers a good while before I was.
This seemed like a sort of apartheid. Coot (as we all called him) had entered a new part of life and I had not. I stared with envy at him and other peers, one by one making the transition into full length trousers. Was I the last kid in Nottingham to move up? Was I condemned to be ever the child? If I remember rightly, the word teenager was only then coming into common usage as was the establishment of a distinctive youth culture. Previous to this, the adage of being seen and not heard still held sway and was rarely challenged.
But another sartorial revolution for youngsters was about to happen around the same time. Denim was making itself known this side of the pond. Denim was a material the like of which we had never seen. It hinted at Texas cowboys, it hinted at outlaws, it hinted at the kind of adventures not normally available to those growing up in a Nottingham suburb – even if that suburb, Sherwood, could boast of its own romantic historical hero, Robin Hood with his very own outlaws.
(Sherwood Forest and the Major Oak incidentally are more than 20 miles from Sherwood itself, but we’ll let that pass.)
Back to denim; Our parents hated the stuff, so we knew it was something we wanted. But the Mortimer brothers suffered the double indignity of being late into long trousers and not being allowed into denim at all! And guess who was the first to wear denim in our area? That’s right. Coot.
The wonder is that given such dreadful disadvantages, I did not turn into a juvenile delinquent. A sense of injustice burnt strongly in my heart as I witnessed my contemporaries strutting around school in long trousers and in the evenings
“The Mortimer brothers suffered the double indignity of being late into long trousers and not being allowed into denim at all!
and weekends flaunting their denim jeans on Sherwood Estate.
Talking of shorts, I notice that this weekend the white shorts worn by Muhummad Ali for his 1975 world title fight against Joe Frazier (the ‘Thriller in Manila’ and possibly the best boxing match ever seen) are being put up for auction. They’re expected to fetch several million dollars. Ali won the fight, by the way.
I met Ali when he came to Tyneside in 1977 with his new bride Veronica and they confirmed their marriage at the new Al Azhar mosque in South Shields.
He was the most magnificent specimen of manhood I had ever laid eyes on. Most boxers bear some evidence of the years slugging it out in the ring, especially at heavyweight level, but there was not a mark on Ali. To add to this staggering physical presence, he had a wit, intelligence and imagination that I had never known in any sportsperson of any persuasion, nor am ever likely to in the future.
As a fairly straight up hetro, I’d never been physically infatuated with a male of the species, but if anyone came close, it was Muhummad Ali – self-styled, and accurately so, as the Greatest.
■ Planet Corona – The First One Hundred Columns, IRON Press, £8.00
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