Opinion Matrix: Dress sense, Tiktok and too safe
THE Covid-19 effect on dress sense, Tiktok as a co-parent and our obsession with being safe were the topics debated by columnists in the newspapers.
Daily Mail
Tom Utley confessed to writing his column while wearing timefaded brown chinos from John Lewis and a favourite checked shirt, bought on a trip to Scotland at least 10 years ago.
“Its collar is frayed, there are cigarette burns down its front and Mrs U has long had ambitions to tear it up and turn it into dusters,” he said. “To complete my lockdown look, over the back of my chair hangs a crumpled blue linen jacket which, if my wife is to be believed, has become distinctly whiffy since its last visit to the dry cleaners more than three months ago.”
Like millions of others, he admits, his lockdown working dress standards have plummeted during working from home.
“I’m now wondering how many of us men — after all these weeks in which we’ve slobbed around happily in whichever casual clothes came to hand — will ever want to go back to more formal office attire when it’s all over,” he added. “Could it be that among its many unexplored social consequences, the coronavirus may have hastened the disappearance of the suit and tie from our workplaces?”
However, he pointed out, if people are dressed roughly the same way at work – in a suit – it could foster the sense of being in a team.
“There are other advantages, too, in wearing business suits to the office. For example, we male traditionalists have always been spared the agony suffered by so many women, who have to decide every morning: ‘What will I wear today?’,” he said.
“Let me assure readers that as soon as the all-clear sounds, after this wretched lockdown finally ends, I’ll revert to my old practice of addressing you respectfully, dressed in a suit and tie ... assuming that my work clothes still fit, after all these months of idle bingeing.”
The Guardian
Emma Brockes said the downside of single parenting during a pandemic was relying on Tiktok as a co-parent.
She said everything went to plan for the first two weeks – home schooling, colouring, piano.
“After two weeks, I received a chasing email about a deadline, made the decision that it was the girls’ work or mine, and in the face of every parental instinct, absented them from school and broke out the ipads,” she said.
“Obviously, now, I regret downloading Tiktok, which carries an age advisory of 13. My kids are five-and-a-half. But you learn very quickly, while working full-time with no help, that content made specifically for five-year-olds won’t sustain their attention for long.”
The most reliable way to buy half a day of uninterrupted work time is Tiktok, she said.
“It is teens doing weird tricks with Oreos, or skateboard stunts, or dances, or bad skits.
“Vaguely sexualised language has started to creep in, so that every dance my girls do is now accompanied by the phrase, “shake your booty!”
The family is now in a period of detox, she said.
“Maybe this is just my kids’ generation’s version of every moral panic about children and media since the invention of radio waves. Then, one morning, I hear my daughter casually tell her sister, “You have a fat ass.” And that’s it. Until the next time, there’s no alternative: we’re out.”
Daily Express
Frederick Forsyth is sick of seeing the word “safe” everywhere.
We have become nationally obsessed with it, he said.
“You see it everywhere. Every government exhortation.every TV ad. Every hoarding.very headline.”
He argued that a 100 per cent safe life was no life worth living.
“Only those who sleep in the nearby cemetery are utterly safe,” he said.
“Cross the road? Drive on it? Ride a bicycle?
“Swim off a summer beach? Ever heard of an undertow, a riptide? Better be safe – don’t swim.
“In short, don’t do anything enjoyable.”
He said that, during his boyhood, the word safe, taken to extremes, was reserved for wimps.
“Have we become, under government instruction, a nation of them?,” he asked. “The Jolly Cricketers is open again and I am going for my lunchtime glass.
Now there’s a risk I might choke on it.
“But I won’t.
“I’ll just enjoy it.
“So knickers to ‘safe’.”