A ring

A ring I made for my wife last weekend, in oxidized silver and 18-carat gold.

I’m cheating; it’s not the ring I’m interested in. It’s resting on a tool I used to make it: a screwdriver made in 1900, which belonged to my great grandfather, an engineer.  

The wide, heavy tang stamped with its date of manufacture looks unbreakable; the wooden handle is oily-dark from four generations of hands; the flattened, splayed base has been struck with a hammer many times. This is a true tool.

But what really interests me is the way family history reduces us all to fragmentary, one-line lives. My great-grandfather: chief engineer on the RMS Mauretania; died bankrupt. My grandfather: engineer and entrepreneur; insisted on paying off his father’s debts before marrying my grandmother; my father: soldier and banker; I'm too close to say what else.   

Together, these biographic synecdoches become our roles in a family narrative.  It’s curious to think that the elements of my life that will join that narrative may not yet have happened. Or worse, they may already be behind me. 

A bag

A fabric bag, made for me by my mother in the early 1970s.

I was clearing out my workshop last weekend, getting ready to make things again, and there on the floor was the bag, next to my father’s heavy wooden tool-till.  

I would carry my things to nursery in this bag. In the fringed front pocket, three jaffa cakes, carefully wrapped by my mother in a white square of kitchen roll. 

Then the piecemeal dismantling of the chocolate, the unpeeling of the quivering orange jelly, alive in sticky little-boy fingers. 

An overcoat

A double-breasted navy-blue herringbone overcoat made for my grandfather by WG Jennings, in the early 1950s.  
 
When I inherited it from my father, it was lined with ripped silk-satin that needed repairing; but a local tailor told me no-one made such heavy satin any more.  Stupidly, I replaced it with cotton.  Why didn’t I just patch the silk; and keep patching the silk, again and again and again?  Now, I would.  But the tears were the wear from not one but two dead men, neither of them anonymous.  So the heavy midnight silk went; and I’m sure the tailor used it for quite a price.  

Curiously, people treat me differently when I wear this coat.  Who would notice a old, dark, plain overcoat?  Yet they do; even at 60, with moth-gnawed shoulders and cheap cotton lining, it’s that beautiful.  The wear and tear of age is a beauty all of its own.  

And the ghostly blur at the foot of the photograph?  That’s the person who’ll inherit this next.

Another overcoat

A Paul Harnden overcoat, bought from Dover Street Market.

Some things feel so special, so unusual, that you long to wear them whenever you can. I crave each day that’s cold enough to pull this on, to be here within its roughened, crumpled wool-and-linen serge. Like the John Moore boots below, this coat is a still-secret language to others; but those who speak it would have it no other way. 

To most, it’s goth-ninja-cum-chimneysweep; but Cayce Pollard would understand it.  
“Secrets are the very root of cool.”

A hat

A trilby from Christys, bought from Hornets in Kensington.

There’s a story called Mr McNally’s hat by Shirley Hughes, in which her toddling hero Alfie gets a trilby like this as a reward for helping Mrs McNally clear out her wardrobe. Mr McNally had thought the hat “would give him height”, but his wife hated it so much she hid it. 

What possesses a man when he decides to buy a hat? Alfie looks very smooth in his, just as my own three-year-old son looks unfeasibly handsome in mine. But while some can wear them, others just shouldn’t; I’ve tried, and I shouldn’t. So this sits on the pink plastic dog in my son’s bedroom, and my hair gets wet when it rains. 

An anorak

An Arc'teryx Veilance anorak, bought from the Hideout.

Is this the peak of mil-spec technology crossing over to mainstream surplus utility? This jacket would probably get you through a nuclear winter.

“An obsession with the idea not just of the right stuff, but of the special stuff. Equipment fetishism. The costume and semiotics of achingly elite police and military units.  Intense desire to possess same, of course, and in turn to be associated with that world. With its competence, its cocksure exclusivity.... Virtually none of these products will ever be used for anything remotely like what they were designed for. Of course, that’s true of most of the contents of your traditional army-navy store. Whole universes of wistful male fantasy in those places. But the level of consumer motivation we’re seeing, the fact that these are often what amount to luxury goods, and priced accordingly. That’s new.”  Hubertus Bigend’s definition of ‘gear queer’, from Zero History, by William Gibson.

You can get into a juicy debate about a moneyed but disenfranchised new proletariat, pacified by consumerism while co-opting the uniforms and stylistic tropes of the mechanisms being used by the state to keep us all in place; but the end result of all this is that I have a torch that is so bright it can be used as a defensive weapon, which I use to help pick up the dog’s turds in the dark. These may truly be the last days.  

A handkerchief

A large gingham handkerchief, bought online some time ago, who knows where.

The blood came from my son’s mouth; it welled up between his teeth and gums and spilled over his lips where his face had hit the pavement, tumbling over a scooter’s handlebars.   

A stain like this will never completely wash out; it will always be there to remind me of that frantic pain that can explode unexpectedly, instantaneously, in response to my inability to completely protect him. 

A fleece jacket

A fleece jacket, bought at one of those outdoors shops in Covent Garden in the late 90s. I remember the salesman telling me it was a "technical fleece" - which is sales-speak for ‘it costs more’. 

Somewhere there’s a very cheesy photograph of me in this jacket, at Everest base camp in Tibet in 1998: arms folded, wraparound mirror shades and a week’s stubble, gurning at the camera with the mountain’s rocky triangle behind me.

Under an endless carpet of stars, I stood in a bone-dry night and listened to Yes! I am a long way from home, by Mogwai. It was so cold I had to jam my Walkman down my underpants to get the batteries warm enough to make it work. Stood there in the middle of the Milky Way, music had never sounded so good, and I had never felt so small. 

A pair of boots

A pair of John Moore boots, finally bought, but only recently, from Present. I had wanted a pair of his shoes since the mid-1980s; but he was long-dead. Then someone started making them again.

It would be easy to dismiss these as ridiculous; but are they absurd, or just unfamiliar? In a sense, they are meta-shoes: shoes about shoes, pointing to the superfluousness of all the other aesthetic choices made in our footwear.

Above all, they are a like a lost language from my past, which pulls at the tongues of those who had forgotten they spoke it.

A sweater

A cashmere sweater, bought from a Joseph sample sale in the mid-90s.  

There’s a picture of me in this sweater, cutting slices of cake at my Grandmother’s 90th birthday party. When everyone else was noisily enjoying themselves, I found myself sitting alongside my grandmother, as she sat in one of the armchairs that sits across from me now.  

“When your grandfather and I were young, I watched our friends go travelling everywhere, and he told me, 'Don’t worry, old stick, when I’m retired, you and I will see the world.'  And then he died when he was 63.”

Seize the day, put no trust in the future (Horace)

A handkerchief

A handkerchief, bought from Paul Smith’s Floral Street shop, in 1988 or 1989.

Washed so many times it has become like voile, with holes that grow larger with each use. It will soon fall apart, but right now is approaching perfection.

A shirt

A check shirt from Crichton, bought by my father in the 1990s.

I last wore this shirt in Milan a decade ago. I was meeting a colleague who was moving to London, and it seemed important to show those Italians - with their comically studied sprezzatura - who invented this thing of ours. So I wore this with a red and blue Debonair woven tie,a navy-blue windowpane-check bespoke suit from Kilgour French and Stanbury, and a pair of Johnny Moke chelsea boots. Nice.

The office in Milan was a former brothel, so each room had its own lavatory and overlooked the atrium so the ladies could advertise themselves to punters below. We ate ham and figs for lunch, and on the ground floor there was a deli where I bought fresh pasta and cheese to take home. British menswear conquers all, but Italian food wins every time. 

Steve took us to the tourist spot in the city where you heel-spin in a well-worn depression on the bull’s balls - an omen that you will return to the city; but like the shirt, I’ve yet to go back.

A T-shirt

A T-shirt from Filmelange, another Japanese company making an art of the everyday.  

There are some things that are, or become, so soft and familiar that you don’t notice them.  Then there is that rare object or experience that is even softer - whose softness makes it unavoidable, impossible to ignore.  

In a department store a girl asked if I’d like to try one of Aesop’s scents, then said, “This is the best way to put it on...”, applying it to her wrist, then pushing up my sleeve and smearing her skin against mine; I can almost taste its softness now.  It was the most curiously erotic thing a stranger has ever done to me. 

At a Christmas party in the mid-90s, on a balcony overlooking the Mall, a colleague stepped through the doors and kissed me on the mouth, our lips overlapped for a moment, me-her-me-her.  As she pulled back, my bottom lip caught between hers and pulled away from me for a heartbeat, no more; but it’s still there.  

A summer blazer

My father’s school blazer from the 1950s, which I then wore in the 1980s.  

I wore this to my graduation in 1992. As he handed me my degree certificate, the Chancellor asked me, “Rugby or Cricket?”, to which I replied: “What?”  

In our first summer at university, my then-girlfriend and I worked in London, and went to stay with her friend in Fulham. I was wearing this blazer when we arrived; her friend said I looked like a city trader. That night we drove around town in her father’s Mercedes, loaded his garage account with cigarettes and cassettes, and then went to Philip Sallon’s new club.

Getting ready to leave the next morning, I dried my hair in her mother’s bedroom. In the mirror I saw, to my horror, a huge crack in the ceiling, directly beneath the bed that my girlfriend and I had given an enthusiastic going-over a few hours earlier.  

We couldn’t say nothing, so we came cheek-burningly clean, only to be told: “Oh, that’s been there for years...”

A pair of pyjama trousers

A pair of pyjama trousers, bought from The Gap three years ago.  

Something has always bothered me about them; they seemed too familiar, but I couldn't say why.  Then last week it came to me: the fabric is almost identical to the nightshirt my father wore on his deathbed.

Beneath it, his skin had shrunk tight to his ribs, the muscles gone who-knows-where; his breastbone - the shield for his heart - was the hardest thing I have ever felt. 

Then finally, the incongruous plumped-swollen pillow resting beneath the chin, a buttress against the slack-jawed smile of death. “I’d forgotten they do that...” said my sister; then the nurse's awkward, compulsive lie over our shoulders: “...he wasn’t alone when he died.” 

It would have been his 75th birthday today. What a stupid thing to say, to even think. There is no ‘would have been’; there is nothing but this. 

An umbrella

My grandmother’s umbrella; borrowed years ago from my mother’s porch, and never returned.  

There is festival mud rubbed into the silk, the ferrule is cracked, and its joints are held together with blue thread; but its perfect, black bat-wing angular arc keeps us dry.

I remember my sister and I dithering along behind my grandmother, the brolly's brass tip tapping the ground as she strode to the brow of the road by her house. She farted mid-stride and the two of us fell about; but she ignored it.  

I saw her last on the top floor of the hospital, high above London, her ice-cream hair backlit by grey window-light; she wore a flowery nightdress, which hung slightly open at the chest. She could not speak, but squeezed my hand with her three good fingers, and pointed to the door, exhaling sharply, gesturing with her breath. It was time to go.

A zipped sweatshirt

A zipped sweatshirt, bought from Agnes B on the rue du Jour, in the late 1990s.

For five years I worked for a company that handled Absolut Vodka’s art sponsorship. While on a trip to New York, I got a call from Michael Holman, who had founded the band Gray (“not black or white, but gray”) with Jean Michel Basquiat in 1979. The band was reforming and coming to the UK to play a gig at the ICA, and he was looking for sponsors.  

Wearing this sweatshirt, black APC jeans, and a black moleskin jacket, I walked downtown to meet him in a West Village cafe on a bright, cold Autumn day. We drank bad coffee and he told me about the time he had spent with Basquiat, while I tried to look nonchalant. As I was leaving, he gave me an unmarked tape containing the band’s songs on one side, and on the other, an unfeasibly rare recording of a phone-performance piece by Basquiat.  

A couple of years later, I was recording a mix-tape and could only find one apparently blank cassette. I think you know what happened next.

A pair of boxer shorts

A pair of boxer shorts, bought from Banana Republic in Coconut Grove, in the late 90s.

My wife detests these pants; I think it’s the colour, which might best be described as “grimy peach”. I bought them on one of the best holidays of my life - a week-long stay with friends who had recently moved from New York to Florida. The beginning of February was bitterly cold in London; but Miami was in the low 20s, the seafood was great, and all the bars served Bacardi Anejo. There was nothing to dislike.  

Leggy and I were sitting at the traffic lights in his car, giggling and stoned, when his Trinidadian accent drawled, “Dude... Sly!” I look out of the window, and there he is right next to me: Sylvester Stallone, about to climb into a black S600. He was very short; I was very high.

A sweatshirt

A  sweatshirt, bought from Loopwheeler in Tokyo, in 2007.  

I love the way Japanese companies look at things and ask, what could this be like if it were made as well as humanly possible? This sweatshirt is one answer: cotton thread, slowly loop-wheeled on old, noisy machines; made with care, because it mattered.  

There’s a Japanese story which comes to mind when I feel guilty about the work I do. An old thief visits a Zen master, seeking redemption and enlightenment having done so much wrong in his life. The monk asks him, “What are you?” to which he replies, “A thief.”  

“Then be a good thief.” says the monk.   

Fashion and the vain pursuit of elegance are ludicrous; but this sweatshirt was made by a good thief. 

A silk scarf

A silk scarf by Jean Paul Gaultier, bought from Jones in Floral Street, probably around 1989 or 1990.

I bought this trying to impress a girl who had much more money than I did.  She owns a restaurant now; but I still have this scarf, and I still love it.  This winter it’s going to be coiled round my neck above black overcoat and jeans, like a ruby on the proverbial proud crow’s throat.

A pair of spectacles

My everyday specs - a pair of Nebbs, bought at the crest of the nerd-glasses wave from Moscot on Orchard Street, on a very hot day in July 2008. 

On their first outing, two people commented on them.  The first in the office: “I like your glasses - very Lower East Side...”; the second in the airport: “cool glasses.” And then nothing since.  

I flew through the night in a booze-and-valium haze, arriving home on my birthday as my wife woke up. We picnicked in Hyde Park, eating food from another time zone, which seemed just a little exotic. My six-month-old son sat on my chest and giggled, and the quote that came to my mind now sits beneath a photo from that day: “The meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit.”  

I don’t replace my glasses very often, and what struck me was that I could see clearly for the first time in years. Walking round the park that morning, the world had sharp edges I had never noticed before.  

A poncho

An army-issue poncho, given to me by my father when I was a boy. 

I wore it in the garden on a summer day, corners trailing on the grass, its musty-stores smell filling my little nose. Ten years later, I bivvied beneath it in the Arctic Circle, under a midnight sun. Now it’s my son’s groundsheet, for eating picnics in the forest. 

A pair of sunglasses

A pair of Randolph aviators, bought from Opera Opera in Covent Garden, in 1991.

Why you should never go shopping with a bad hangover: part one.

“Now, where have I seen these before?” you’re thinking.  Of course: Don Draper’s sunglasses (actually, his are probably American Optical, because Randolph Engineering wasn’t founded until 1972; but I digress).  

When he wears them, they look cool, because the costume designer made sure he wore the right size; and because he’s Don Draper.  I, however, was nursing a bad case of acute alcoholic remorse, and got a pair that perch on my nose like blind widow’s pince-nez.  They just don’t work.  At all.  

A leather jacket

A leather jacket, bought from Johnson’s, on the King’s Road, in 1991.

Why you should never go shopping with a bad hangover: part two.

Bought on the same day as the sunglasses, under the influence of the same hangover (port-induced). The sunglasses were at least a size too small, the jacket at least a size too big. The one thing you don’t want a leather jacket to be is too big; spindly + big leather = never a good look.

I hang onto it in the belief that when my son says, “Daddy, can I have a leather jacket?” I’ll show him this, and he’ll gaze with jaw-dropped awe, mumbling “Woah, cool...” or something like that. In fact, it will probably be “WTF?”  

But what interests me now is the failure (and reconstitution) of memory. I remember buying the jacket on the same July day as the sunglasses. But who would buy - and then wear - such a heavy jacket in July? Did I really buy it then? I don’t actually remember buying it from Johnson’s, but I ‘know’ I did. I remember sitting on the tube platform sweating and feeling so queasy I had to go back up to the street. And then what...?

A smoking jacket

A bottle-green velvet shawl-collared smoking jacket, bought from Harrods by my father in the early 1960s.  

Its label claims it’s water-repellent, so it was clearly designed for a party. Sadly, it’s not stain-proof, judging by the lapels; I can’t be sure which of us was reponsible for that.  

This is indeed a smoking jacket. But who wears such a jacket now, except drunk crazy old men? Well, this Autumn, I’m going to. Not out in public, of course; but I see myself putting down roots in an armchair with a large scotch and the new Michel Houellebecq, the smell of woodsmoke and louche living filling my nostrils.

Curiously, it has a 1964 silver sixpence in the pocket. Could this have been my father’s “lucky” jacket? And seriously, why would you need more luck if you were wearing a jacket like this?

A black suit

“Probably every new and eagerly expected garment ever put on... falls a trifle short of the wearer’s expectations.”  Charles Dickens

A black herringbone suit, made by Norton & Townsend in 1996.

This was the first suit I had made for me. When I put it on for the first time, it looked nothing like I had envisioned it. Or rather, I looked nothing like I had imagined I would when wearing it: I had been thinking ‘Bryan-Ferry sleek’, but ended up with ‘pencil-necked Tulkinghorn’.  

But I’m feeling gothic this Autumn, and a close-cut, fishtail-cuffed black carapace might just fit the bill. I think this too will be leaving the dark of the wardrobe this October.

A sweatshirt

Halston, Gucci, Fio-rucci... A Fiorucci sweatshirt, bought in the mid-eighties from a long-forgotten shop in Newcastle.

That urge we have to do something, say something, wear something: we’re all following someone else, though we may not know it. How hard it is to see the origin of our desires, even when they’re obvious to others. Did anyone ever have a truly original idea; or is every thing we do a citation, every self-expression just post-production?

A boy at school - a sportsman who was Grabber to my Molesworth - had a similar sweatshirt, worn with beaten-up 501s (most probably bought from the basement pile under the stairs at American Classics); his bore an ‘Ozark Mountain’ logo. What did he think when he saw me wear this? Did he even notice? What was it he had that I wanted, which I projected onto this sweatshirt? Questions, questions. 

My wife saw this yesterday and asked if she could wear it. It has horses on it; she likes horses. 

A polka-dot shirt

On the subject of clothes from the 80s that have been largely unwearable ever since: a polka-dot shirt, bought from The Gap in 1988.  

Its black dye has faded with repeated washings, so I must have worn it a lot (under a long-lost velvet-soft black suede bomber jacket). But not recently; not for 20 years.

How is that things that seemed so right can come to feel so very wrong?  The fear of joining the ‘man-blouse’ phenomenon that seems still worryingly prevalent may yet stop me from giving this shirt another chance this Autumn. 

A grey suit

A WG Jennings suit from 1963; the oldest of my father’s suits, made for him in his 20s.
 

When my father died, my mother offered the choice of his suits to her brother; this was among the ones he took. When I found out, I almost cried; and the suit was returned to me.   

I would curiously paw this jacket as it hung bow-backed and lifeless in his dressing-room wardrobe. Its musty labyrinthine thread back to his past, to his youth, fascinated me; and does still.
 

A close, military cut - shoulders-back tight across the back; calico pockets stained brown, with age, dirt, sweat, and blood from fingers. Triple-holed by moth, I’ve not worn it in a decade. But if I never wear it again, I need to know it’s there in the back of the wardrobe.

A silver ring

A silver ring, set with a blood-red garnet; made for me in 2003 by Armand Serra at Crazy Pig Designs.

The back is engraved with the Pali word - Pathavisanna - a Theravadan Buddhist meditation: all material objects are only manifestations of the same ‘earth’ element; any value we attach to them is illusory.

Bruce Chatwin wrote that Buddha’s final words were “Walk on!” - an exhortation not to sink not into the world, to cling to things. How hard that is.