Sure, I’ve legs like a rugby prop... but oh I will miss my denim shorts

MY SISTER will miss them almost as much as I will. When I told her that my denim shorts were being retired, she was genuinely upset. ‘But they’re how I know it’s summer,’ she protested.

It turns out that my mother hates them. Who knew?

‘Never liked them,’ she said when I broke the news. ‘I don’t like the way the pockets hang down lower than the legs of the shorts.’

To be fair, since I’ve had to sew up the ends of those pockets, they do linger a little on the thigh.

My sister thought I’d had them for about 15 years, but I’ve assured her that it’s not that long. I had an almost identical pair before these ones – up to and including the patched pockets – and I only replaced them when they literally started to fall down in public.

This pair are only about eight years old – though like their predecessors, they’ve now stretched so much that they are in danger of becoming a public-order issue (I’d love to claim that I’ve shrunk; regrettably, all the shape-shifting has been theirs.)

I put them on every year some time in April and they go back into the wardrobe round about now. Obviously, I don’t wear them every day. I have a green pair that I wear on the one day a week when the denim ones are in the wash. But to be honest, aside from trips to the gym and the odd evening out during those summer months, I wear them pretty much all the time.

They have been to Australia and America, to London, to Spain, to Greece and to Portugal. I have worn them in Kerry and Kilkenny and all along the Wild Atlantic Way. I wrote a play in them in Thurles. I have fished off the Blaskets in them, they have accompanied my mother to hospital appointments and witnessed Dublin win All-Irelands in Croke Park.

I have written dozens of these columns in them. I am wearing them now. I have worn them through rain, sunshine and storms.

I never look out the window and think, this is not a day for the denim shorts. If it’s a day between April and the end of September, it’s a day for the denim shorts.

You might think that I must have great legs. I don’t. I have terrible legs. Terribly tanned legs, to be fair – and legs that work extremely well insofar as they notch up impressive mileage without ever complaining – but let’s just say that Cian Healy would beat me hands down in a Lovely Legs contest. My legs are very short and very stocky – and my knees are almost the size of my head – but in the summer months and environs, I just can’t bear to keep them covered up.

It’s not really about the legs, you see: it’s all in the mind.

When I am wearing my denim shorts, sunbathing is a distinct possibility. Barbecues are never too far away. When I put them on in April, I know that by the time they return to their winter berth, I will have swum in the sea in Ireland and cycled many miles down country roads and I will have eaten at least one 99.

NONE of those things happen when my denim shorts are in the wardrobe. I set the alarm every day when my denim shorts are in the wardrobe. I don’t check the weather app every morning. I never drink rosé and I don’t boil potatoes in seawater. I do not eat fish I’ve caught myself.

At the end of this week, my denim shorts are going in the bin. They are literally falling apart. When I run my fingernail across the turn-ups on the legs, the fabric splits.

I’d love to give them one more spin next year, but they are completely wrecked, ruined, well and truly worn Lacking support: Scarlett Johansson at the Emmys out. Goodnight, sweet denim princes. You have served me well. I have prolonged this glorious summer – and all the inglorious ones that came before it – for as long as I possibly could, but now it’s time to put away foolish things like denim shorts.

There are alarms to set, covers to be pulled over patio furniture, college fees to be paid, Christmas ads to tut-tut over. When I ran into the shop yesterday morning, my hood pulled up against the blustery burst of rain, and, my legs glistening in the wet, the assistant asked if I intend to remain in my tattered denim shorts forever.

If only, I thought. Oh, if only.