Excuse me, but would you like to see my underpants?
No, I didn’t think so.
And if I wanted to see yours, I would hope this is something we could negotiate over dinner and drinks rather than just having them flashed at me when I go into a shop to buy a newspaper or a coffee.
Not that I have anything against underpants. They serve several valuable purposes but advertising shouldn’t be one of them.
Blame Calvin Klein, I suppose, or his savvy marketers who turned the humble elastic waistband into portable billboards that at first peeked but now shriek at us wherever we go.
Underwear got higher and jeans got lower and the increasing distance between them – whole bottoms’ worth in some cases – exactly matches the gulf between what I see and what I understand.
Mark Wahlberg may have been able to get away with it but there is a very good chance that you are not Mark Wahlberg so please pull your pants up.
And don’t call me sir.
Someone called me sir the other day as they displayed their underwear to me while bending down to retrieve the danish I’d ordered from the display case and it brought my mind to a complete halt.
Being called sir while viewing someone’s underwear is something you’d have to work hard to talk me into and yet here it was happening to me unbidden and on an empty stomach.
I need to get ready for something like that.
And when did Australians start calling each other sir?
When I was growing up men were “mate” and women were “love” and as quaint and sexist as that may be there was behind it all a great tradition of Australian egalitarianism that seems to have been pushed aside in the name of service.
People seem to think that calling someone sir equates to the delivery of a high standard of hospitality but you can get called sir all you want and still struggle to catch a waiter’s eye when your glass needs refilling.
Less sir, more eye contact would be a better recipe for a good night out.
And while we’re at it, can you please brush your hair, tuck your shirt in, turn down that music, and get off my lawn?
I have become a codger, a fogey, or – my favourite term of art – a curmudgeon and I’m determined to embrace it to the full.
My first grey hair appeared when I was 18 years old. That first one was free but I’ve earned every single one since and they can each tell a story.
At least the ones that remain.
Not quite 50, I have more white in my beard than my father. In medical terms this is called terminal pigmentation but it’s just one more gruesome step on the way to terminal everything.
I am, for what it’s worth, a greybeard but the wisdom that that implies seems to have eluded me and the only thing I’m sure of is that the older I get, the less I know.
When I was studying piano I learned a little piece by the great French composer and eccentric Erik Satie. I was technically pretty good at it, but the better I got, the more confused about it I became.
My teacher, an impish little genius called Hashimoto-sensei, leaned back and smiled one day and said, “Ah, muushi o shiteru” which means “To know no knowledge.”
She seemed very pleased with me, which just made my confusion all the worse. Here I was apparently enlightened and I couldn’t even enjoy it.
This was in Japan, where a couple of years ago sales of adult diapers overtook sales of infant diapers, a grim sign of things to come and not something you want peeking over the top of your jeans.
So I am determined to enjoy the hard-won grumpiness of a premature old age.
I laugh and joke and knock about with the journalists on my team as if I were one of them and then remember that I am old enough to be their father in many cases.
They are kind enough to humour me.
– Jem Hedley
