An Almost Entirely Pointless Piece On The Weather

There was something about the girl at the station's legs that caught my eye. It wasn't that they were a particularly nice pair of legs, in fact I'd go so far as to say that they were positively among the worst legs I've ever seen. The reason I noticed them is simply because it was precisely that: a pair of legs, and at this cold time of year you don't tend to see the female of the species baring their pins to the world. But that's precisely what this young woman was doing, in a tiny skirt that certainly looked professional (albeit most definitely not in the business sense of that word), the effect worsened considerably by not wearing any tights. Being very pale, it was the combination of the two that made her stand out as she walked through the ticket hall toward the bitterly cold Milton Keynes weather outside. Seeing her dressed the way she was made me shiver, in spite of seemingly being prepared for a blizzard.

I can't begin to imagine what possesses someone to dress in such an inappropriate manner – in the sense of it not being the appropriate weather for such an outfit (but also in the sense of not being able to carry it off). Everyone knows it's cold in January, so I can't fathom why someone like this woman, when planning what to wear that day, would pick out something suited to a mere handful of days, and that's if we're blessed enough here in Britain to actually get a summer, but even if the forecast in January was for mild weather, surely something inside would tell you that a skirt that short isn't sensible. To then think that you'll wear it sans hosiery is surely beyond stupid.

There's a guy who parks his car next to mine during the week whose wardrobe barely changes all year. He wears a short-sleeved shirt every single day, and right up until late November was wearing one without a coat; as the temperature dropped, his sole concession has been to stick on a very thin jacket, of the variety worn by a tennis player from about 1985 after a match. He takes the same walk as me down to the station, and normally has a head-start on me, leaving me trailing woefully behind and wondering how it's possible for him to be so impervious to the cold.

Don't even get me started on the guys who bring their bikes onto the train and wear those tiny lycra cycling shorts and t-shirts. While I admire their commitment to fitness, such clobber practically induces hypothermia in me just thinking about it.

We have a South African family living opposite us. We call the patriarch No Shoes because in the summer he very rarely wears anything on his feet. He also wears shorts for the most part of the year and only in the last few weeks has he started wearing long trousers. He's one of those alpha male types, so it's probably the case that he's too proud to admit to being cold. I don't understand it though; when I was at university, we had a high Greek student population, and it was always the case that during even the balmiest British summer term, they’d be wearing thick North Face puffer jackets. When I asked one of the more approachable chaps in one of my classes as to why this was the case, he explained that compared to their own weather, this was actually cold. Accordingly, during winter the puffer jacket was augmented by enormous Thinsulated gloves and scarves that were more like blankets. The effect was to swell the ordinarily trim guys into clones of the Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters.

So, given that No Shoes has moved from similarly sunny climes to Britain, surely he is similarly acutely sensitive to drops in temperature. But still he persists in wearing the barest minimum when stepping outside his front door, whatever the weather. I can only assume that during the winter his heating is fired up to maximum and that this distorts his ability to discern the correct temperature. All I know is that when I see him wearing a t-shirt outside during the winter it makes me feel really cold.

Writing about No Shoes reminded me of a boy I went to primary school with, Anthony Sutton. I recall one day being in the toilets before the school day started when an awful kafuffle started coming from one of the stalls, from a wailing boy and what sounded like an adult female. Said boy was the aforementioned Anthony and the adult was his mother. I think it was a day during late autumn, and a note had come around to parents advising that the summer uniform had come to an end and that girls needed to switch from their summer dresses to a blouse and skirt, whereas boys needed to stop wearing those horrid little grey shorts they made us wear in favour of long trousers.

I couldn’t wait for that memo to come round and I was in my long trousers faster than you could say Jack Frost, but Anthony was far less enthusiastic. In fact, he seemed pretty opposed to the idea, as the fracas in the toilet stall was his mother trying to get him to put on his long trousers rather than the shorts she’d put him in evidently just to coerce him as far as the school gate. According to my own mother, who spoke to Anthony’s at the school gate later that day, the only way she managed to get him to wear the long trousers was by taking a pair and cutting them down into shorts so that he’d see there was nothing to be afraid of. Fancy being scared of a pair of long trousers! I’m not really one to comment, I was afraid of wellington boots and would beg my mum to let me stay at home when the snow started falling as I didn’t want to have to put them on to go to school. I was also scared of whoopee cushions. I had a few issues as a child.

A few years ago the company I work for recruited two new copywriters. One, Nick I think his name was, was a really nice chap who I had a lot of time for. As these were not client-facing roles, there was no requirement for anyone in our team to wear especially formal work attire, so in the department none of us – barring one guy who felt it was his esteemed duty to ensure he was sartorially well-represented in expensive Richard James suits and equally pricey ties – wore a necktie, for example. If I had to go along with a client director to a face to face meeting with his client, I’d dig out a tie from my abysmal collection, but only ever wear it for the duration of that meeting, and wouldn’t be able to get it off fast enough afterwards (I’m still like this today actually, despite being in a client-facing role now).

All through Nick’s tenure with us, which I think started early summer that year, he never wore a tie, for the reasons mentioned above. One day during that winter he came in wearing full suit and tie, making all of us speculate that he was probably off for an interview as it was so out of character. And yet, for the rest of that week he wore the same get-up so I asked him one day why the sea change in dress, to which he responded that the tie was merely a way of stopping his neck getting cold. Why a scarf wouldn’t have sufficed I don’t know. He was a bit quirky like that. I think he went off to write books about marginal cricket stars from bygone years or something.

I had a friend from school, Luke, who went to Newcastle University. By email one day he commented on how little the girls in Newcastle wore on an average winter evening out. I saw a picture on the front cover of one of the tabloids just after New Year which made me think about this; the photo was supposed to be highlighting how bad British binge-drinking had become, the picture being of five or six scantily-clad young women falling about all over the pavements swigging from bottles of alcopops during a New Year night out. The first thing I thought when I saw the picture was not ‘terrible state of affairs all this binge drinking ain’t it?’ but ‘why on earth aren’t they cold?’, the answer to which probably lies in the advanced state of inebriation they were clearly in.

Suffice to say, it’s cold, I’m cold and I can’t wait for the spring to arrive. And whilst I of course don’t support the rape and pillage of our planet which is giving rise to hotter summers and melting ice-caps, at least these days the temperatures don’t seem to drop as far as they did in the seemingly glacial years of my boyhood where you used to get thick layers of snow every year, people used to regularly have snowball fights and go sledging, and you used to see foot-long icicles hanging from overflowing gutters.