A wasp playing dominoes in my trousers
If there’s a benchmark point in life at which it becomes simply embarrassing to maintain the delusion that you’re still more or less the young, slender, perhaps fashionable kind of person that it’s even remotely conceivable may be considered attractive by similar persons, it’s when purchasing a pair of jeans means painful acknowledgement of the fact your waist size has begun to exceed that of your legs.
A first it might be possible to brush this off as a temporary aberration, maybe think “ok, i’ll go for the 34 inch waist, lay off the battenburg and drop that couple of inches again in no time”… this is a lie and you should stop it now for everyone’s sake.
Accept the fact that you are now technically fatter than you are tall. Put those drainpipes back on the peg, return the ‘distressed’ skinny fit t-shirt with the ironic cartoon print from your childhood to Topshop, and use the refund to pick yourself up a some elasticated waist slacks, or possibly a generous pair of chinos, because you are officially now your Dad, and it’s all over.
Having begrudgingly accepted this, it becomes easier to adapt to your new life as a regular perpetrator of fashion crime, such as the adoption of enormous turn-ups necessitated by the impossible task of finding legwear which both accommodates your girth whilst bearing any resemblance to the length stated on the label.It may be popular with the kids, but I just can’t afford to let my the hems of my jeans scrape along the floor, shredding to pieces until they’ve attained sufficient clearance from the ground so that I might make it to the local shop for a bag of Werther’s Originals and the Daily Mail without injuring myself, and possibly others.
Embrace the turn-up, and you may even find it rewards you in small and baffling ways. As well as affording you the expected gifts of accumulated food, gravel and hair, come laundry day you’ll be treated to trouser exotica the likes of which you could only have previously imagined. Unfolding my jeans for the wash this week (waist 36 / leg 32, but more realistically, leg 82) I was surprised to find not only a small domino, but a wasp, sadly deceased.
I like to think he’d been practising for an upcoming tournament, or maybe even just using it to learn rudimentary counting skills. Either way, two things have become very clear; firstly, I need to do some exercise, and secondly, I really need to wash my trousers more often.
