My logo T-shirt can be yours too – for a nice price

IWAS interested to see a young man wearing an Oxford University T-shirt in the Fish Hoek car park the other day. He didn’t look at all like my idea of an Oxford University student (or lecturer, for that matter, but what do I know?) If it hadn’t been for that T-shirt I would have taken him for a vagrant. But who knows what misfortunes befall the alumni of great universities? There are no doubt thousands of Oxford graduates all over the world working as car guards and street sweepers. We live in difficult times.

A little further along, I saw an old man wearing a False Bay Yacht Club shirt several sizes too small for him, and I wondered whether he had been at sea for a long time. His shirt could have shrunk from exposure to the ocean waves. It was salt-stained and his beard was tangled and rather seriously tobacco-stained.

These characters made me wonder about the messages people display on their garments. Do they necessarily have any significance? You can go into any one of several Chinese-owned shops in Fish Hoek and buy a shirt with the logo of your choice emblazoned across your chest. Sports team, university, whisky, country or philosophy – they’ll sell you a shirt to match. That doesn’t necessarily mean you are a customer of Smith & Wesson gunsmiths, or drink Coca Cola or drive a Ferrari. All it means is that you have somehow been conned into walking around advertising a product you don’t use – and actually paying for the right to do so.

I find this extraordinary. I have written in the past that I would be perfectly happy to wear a shirt advertising somebody’s product if they gave me the shirt free and paid me to display it on my fine, healthy body at an agreed rate per hour. So far, I have had no takers.

I admit I have, on occasion, actually paid for T-shirts with logos on them, but that was because I was proud to be associated with the product.

I find Lake Louise in Canada one of the most beautiful places in the world, for example, so I bought a jacket with its name embroidered on it (I also happened to be freezing cold there and needed a warm jacket). I used to be a regular sailor at the False Bay Yacht Club and was proud to wear their insignia on my chest.

Now that I no longer sail there, I do not think it appropriate to wear their badge.

I suppose it now warms the car park attendant in Fish Hoek.

Last Laugh

Two Frenchmen were strolling down the boulevard in Paris when one of them stopped, grabbed his companion’s arm and said in a panic: Here come my wife and my mistress walking together.” His friend gasped in horror and muttered:

I was about to say exactly the same thing!”