Notes from the Sofa Raymond Briggs

Now we are old we like to think we are well above all that nonsense. Grew out of it years ago – was never really in it anyway. Yet I now find myself wearing a peaked cap! Not a baseball cap, I hasten to add, but simply because there is nothing else to buy.

Today, most people don’t wear hats at all, not even ladies. In the Fifties and earlier, no woman would dream of leaving the house without a hat.

In my childhood in the Thirties, hats were a marker of class, for men at any rate. Working-class men wore flat caps, middle-class wore trilbies, City gents wore Homburgs and bowlers. But the dominant one was the trilby. You saw hundreds of them every day. Where are all those trilbies now? Are there attics and outhouses stuffed with heaps of mouldering old trilby hats? When did you last see one? If you do see one, grab it. It will be a collector’s item. Bung it on ebay, or save it for the Antiques Road Show.

It is odd how despite not being interested in fashion, we all have strong dislikes. My main claim to fame in this world is that I am the only person apart from Harold Macmillan who has never worn blue jeans. I don’t hate them, they just annoy me. Why are they blue? Why not green jeans? Pale beige jeans? They don’t seem natural and are certainly not me. They are American, which is bad enough, with a phoney aura of the Wild West, cowboys, and of course, Elvis. Though all that is now very dated. Jeans have moved on and conquered the entire world. Used to be called Denim, which is cheap, tough French cloth from Nîmes (de Nîmes). Frog cloth, another offputter. Now they are universal, worn by women and men, young and old, grannies and children, all dressed in blue cotton trousers! Mad, but it gets madder. The jeans have to have the compulsory bleached white patches on the thighs. Why? And now the latest fad with teenagers is rough horizontal tearing across the thighs, with the pallid flesh beneath gaping through the slits. Why on earth?

Naturally, hair is the number one fashion concern, particularly for ladies. Just count the number of ladies’ hairdressers in the local phone book. As art students, we all had long hair, so when I went into the Army it was quite traumatic to have it almost shaved off. I’ll always remember the barber wading about in piles of hair inches deep round his feet. I had to stop myself screaming at him: Why don’t you sweep it up once in a while, for **** sake? So when I left the Army, I said I would not get my hair cut for one year. It turned out to be a bit embarrassing. Complete strangers would point at me from across the street, laughing. But I bravely stuck it out. It was my way of putting two fingers up at the Army. I suppose we all have pet hates in fashion. Huge white trainers are one of mine. They are all right on American teenagers, but you now see them on elderly English ladies, squelching past on their way to Waitrose, blue jeans as well, of course. But my Number One Fashion Hate was FLARES. Ugh! Such utterly stupid, pointless, dangerous garments! For years I refused to buy them, but at last I needed new trousers and you could not buy anything else. They had stopped making ordinary trousers. I was thinking of founding the R.S.F.P.F., the Royal Society for the Prevention of Flares. I wrote to the Palace, but they didn’t even reply!