Male fashions

The most ridiculous sight has just walked past my study window. A bald man with glasses, aged about 45, wearing a navy suit jacket, black shorts and clumpy black shoes with no socks. Pur-lease! On the Continent men can get away with such outfits as their legs are tanned, toned, exfoliated and moisturised. There is most probably a dab of cologne behind the knees. Nowhere do you see the pallid slabs of calf, the hairy ankles that look like fat sausages sprouting black mould; the bony or pudgy knees, the flabby thighs that could do with three months of exercise-biking to make them an appealing shape. (Mind you, one could say the same about mine. Here are the before and after from Mr G's sneaky photo shoot in his motorhome - the very same vehicle that was stolen from his front garden shortly after his brain haemorrhage in 2000, when its insurance had just run out. Mr G doesn't have much luck. Neither do my shorts, from the look of them!)

Most British men do not have the legs - or the bottoms - for shorts. Which reminds me. I once had a boyfriend who hated his bottom. However, I didn't know that as he'd never told me. One day, he asked me how he looked in a new pair of jeans he'd bought. "They're okay-ish," I said. "But your bum does look a bit big in them." Whereupon this strapping six-footer with the lumberjack beard who worked for a top rock band burst into great, gasping sobs. I had found his Achilles heel - or rather, his Achilles arse. We broke up shortly after this, by which time Queen's song, Fat-Bottomed Girls was in the charts. Rock music had got its own back on me.