A pair of work gloves

A pair of Carhartt hide work-gloves, bought from Smokesilver in Norfolk.  

Used to work in the woods: cutting down years of sprawling hawthorn and dead pines, sawing branches for the fire, poking mossy tinder into cracks between twigs, and sifting the ash below. Then home the next day, the stinks of pine-resin, camp-fire sausages, and woodsmoke clung to their palms.

A Zippo lighter

Another of the array of then-exotic items that my father brought back from the US in 1972.

He gave it to me in 1986, when he gave up smoking his pipe (as a child, I was fascinated by his thumb’s leather callous from tamping-down burning tobacco). My friends and I used it to light illicit cigarettes in an underground room at school; I told him I used it to light the hob in the brew-room. Did I really believe he believed that?

When I still smoked, this was never out of my sight; it was too precious to me, even though my father was still alive. Everyone who knew me knew this was my father’s Zippo. Such an ordinary, utilitarian, perfect object; nothing superfluous, and still working perfectly in its fifth decade, lighting camp-fires and grills for billy-cans.

I’ve taken years off my life with it, maybe just as he did; and one day my son will walk down the street, irresistibly thumb-clanking it open and shut in his pocket, just as we both did.

A pair of underpants

A pair of black cotton Peter Werth trunks, which disintegrated in the sea, August 1994.

There’s a moment, if you’re lucky, when someone you don’t know as well as you’d like to looks like the most beautiful person on earth. It flows through you, as the cold waves crash into the two of you, rising and fall with the tide in the bay, your hair pushed back and the salt stinging your eyes.

The long drive back to London that night, sitting briefly in the dark outside her house, clumsily speaking your mind. The awkward, ghastly, necessary risk of it. Of love.  

Back at home, listening to Jeff Buckley's Live at Sin-e, dizzy with it.  Three days later, Thursday 1st September, seeing him sing at The Garage; then bunking off work together the next day to see him sing in Rough Trade round the corner, packed tight among the record shelves, opening with “What will you say when you see my face?” Ten minutes earlier we’d raised eyebrows of greeting as he smoked by the wall outside, unnoticed by the girls in the street who would fall in love with him in the time to come.    

His obituary from The Times is in the desk drawer in front of me right now. Wading into the Wolf River, sucked under by the wake.  Dizzy with it.

A combat jacket

My father's 1960s-issue British Army jacket. For years, his gardening jacket; now it lives in Norfolk, my beach jacket.  

In September 2003, just back from six weeks in Ladakh, my would-be wife and I would drive to the coast each evening and walk out to the bay, the only people on the yawning stretch of sand.  

In one pocket, a rolled green towel; in the other, a black bin liner and the dog's lead. At the water’s edge, everything was wrapped in the jacket, pushed into the bag; and then we were in, just us, swallowed by the cold, and swimming towards the sun as it dropped into the water.

A hat, a scarf

This week, letting go of what's gone; and what we get in return.

Weeks after his death, we emptied a bootload of my father’s clothes at a nearby homeless shelter.  Box after box, then finally, an afterthought of a white plastic bag.  I opened it and saw for the last time his favourite hat and scarf, tweed and silk, years of him there, passed on to comfort another I would never meet.  

“Terrible is the thought of our old clothes”  (W.G. Sebald)

A pair of riding boots

A pair of hand-made capybara-leather riding boots from Argentina, made for my wife.

They were stunning, with leather like no other: velvet-soft and mottled, moulded to her feet and beaten to hell, the heavily-worn soles’ cracks filled with dirt from stirrups and the Ecuadorian Sierra.  

She was wearing them when she went into labour, then somehow they were left behind when she left hospital.  Irony, metaphors, symbolism; I'll leave you to work them out for yourself.

A pair of sunglasses

A pair of Polaroid sunglasses, bought in the US by my father in 1972.

They have old-fashioned polarised lenses that made car windscreens throw rainbow-oily stripes. With those wide boxy frames, they give the wearer (which would now be me) what is sometimes called “a strong look”; perhaps just a little too much Colonel from Boogie Nights. But in the 1970s, perched on a long straight nose below swept-back silver-grey hair, they looked magnificent.

Let us speak frankly: they are possibly the coolest shades ever made.  Dirty martinis all round.
 

A pinstripe suit

A three-button, roll-two single-breasted suit in a pink pinstripe with an electric-pink lining; made for me in 1998 by Norton & Townsend.  
 

And to be frank, an ‘expression of taste’ you can only make in your twenties, unless you’re Elton John. In the office I worked in at the time, this became known as ‘the suit’; as in, "ah, you're wearing 'the suit' today...'. I don’t imagine I will ever wear it again.  

A parka

A Vexed Generation parka, bought from their shop on Berwick Street in the late 90s; a present from my then girlfriend.  

It now seems hard to remember a time when hooded clothing wasn’t politicised; and this is clothing design as overt political statement - a backlash to the spread of CCTV cameras in the UK, and the wide-ranging powers of the 1994 Criminal Justice Bill.  When the hood is fully zipped, only your eyes are visible. 

In troubled times, civil liberties can vanish in gusts of hysteria.  Right now there are governments making the covering of the face illegal. We must resist them. 

An ash plant

          Dangerous pavements.

          But I face the ice this year

          With my father's stick

                              Seamus Heaney

A summer shirt

A Brooks Brothers patchwork madras shirt, two or three years old. 

My summer holiday shirt; just back from France, line-dried in a howling gale from the Pyrenees; soon to be seen getting in the face of dog-walkers on the beaches of Norfolk and Dorset.  Sadly not a shirt I think I’ll ever wear in town.

A perfume sample

A women’s perfume sample, dropped thoughtlessly in a shopping bag some time in the mid-90s.

It has never been opened; but the ghost of it, the palest traces that cling to its glass and card, are the smell of my mother’s hair from childhood. My head on her neck, my face in her freshly-washed curls, her arms around me, braced against the world.

A scrim scarf

One of two pieces of scrim scarf given to me by my father when I was a little boy. The green piece is long-lost; but somehow I hung onto this one.  

Used many times to keep shirt-collars away from the dhobi-wallah for one more day; then pulled from my neck to cover my head, for the procession round the Golden Temple; then the queue on the stairs with the pilgrims, for dhal and chapatis; then sitting in hungry, snaking rows on clammy linoleum, in the huge white-pillared dining hall.

Then a man walking sideways along the rows - toe-heel, toe-heel - ladelling dhal from a bucket onto metal trays at our feet, in perfect rhythm with his steps, spattering buttery dots on the cuffs of our trousers. 

Another T-shirt

One of two bought from Wave Riding Vehicles in Virginia Beach, at the start of a road trip to Graceland in 1996(?).  

The nicer shirt I gave to a friend’s boyfriend who could actually surf. In 2000, my then-girlfriend and I went to Cornwall with them, and he tried to teach me to surf. In preparation, my girlfriend insisted on waxing my shoulders, so I looked sleek while clumsily nose-diving my board into the waves. But my skin reacted badly to the wax...

When we got to beach on Saturday morning, the boyfriend offered to lend me his fancy made-to-measure wetsuit. Stripping down by the car, I pulled off my T-shirt to reveal an angry lumpy rash engulfing every follicle on my back - about to be tightly pressed and rubbed into his prize wetsuit. His eyes widened slightly as he passed it to me.

Sadly, this was just an insult added to a perceived injury: both he and my then-girlfriend were convinced that his girlfriend and I were having an affair. We weren’t; but I did marry her.  

A handkerchief

A reproduction Seditionaries handkerchief, bought in 1986 from Boy, in Hyper Hyper.  

Three years earlier, and I’d love to tell you I arrived at school listening to The Jam and AC/DC, like some of my contemporaries. But I didn’t. I had several hours of ELO’s back catalogue in my bag; and some Status Quo. Oh, the shame.

And then, like so many other middle-aged bores talking about teenage musical epiphanies, I heard Never Mind the Bollocks, and “from that day on, life would never be the same again...”  

*yawns* 

On the eve of a party four years later, I remember unpicking the seams of my trousers, tapering them with safety pins, adorning them with badges, the handkerchief pinned to my jacket's back. I remember the catcalled abuse; but I had heard it all already, in the wake of other jackets, on other evenings. 

It bewilders me still that the clothes we wear can provoke such fear and loathing, when we choose to stray from the herd. 

Another polo shirt

June 2003.  Riding a bicycle in Beijing, laughing out loud, perfectly in the moment. 

I grasped it, and it was gone. 

A shiny T-shirt

A Jean-Paul Gaultier T-shirt, bought from Bazaar in South Molton Street, in 1988.  

This is probably the campest item of clothing I own, and that’s against some competition. But this shirt had a magic that even its total lack of taste could not remove. It was the first piece of clothing I owned from Jean-Paul Gaultier’s mainline collection; and it was a shirt that demanded sideburns and a quiff. Who was I to ignore it?

It also comes from an exact turning point in British youth culture. As MDMA grinned and gurned its way into London clubland, expensive shiny clothes like this - made for posing at the edge of the room surveying the scene (we were known as ‘Mysterons’, after Captain Scarlet's nemesis) - were quickly replaced by cheap cotton T-shirts made to be sweated into...

For a few months one summer, doormen suddenly had no idea who they were supposed to let in, and dancefloors became a confused soup of overdressed poseurs recoiling in alarm as a growing crowd of sweaty grinners rubbed and wiped themselves all over that month’s wages:  “Oi!  What the fuck...!” And that was how it began.

A pair of wellingtons

That’s not actually a pond behind me; it is the deliquescent remains of a tall building which gazed upon my blue-and-red awesomeness.  

Respect is due also to my little sister, rocking the junior streetwalker look. And while we’re on the subject: the turban; the coat; the gloves! I have no idea who that lady is, but she is killing it.  

But the wellingtons are the object of my gaze now. This photo must predate the only clear memory I have of them: at the bottom of the garden, by the compost heaps, playing with the broken-handled gardening fork that my father used to pile and pack things onto the bonfire.  It would have been almost my height.  I raised it high and drove a half-inch tine through the toe of my boot.  

I don’t remember what happened next; but I do remember the black rubber square of puncture-repair that my father placed over the toe. No one would bother to do that today.

What are she and I looking at? That; my same nervy, awkward hands; and my sister’s gaze looking out across the years, are the things that pierce me now. 

A checked shirt

One of five designs made by Turnbull & Asser for their 125th anniversary in 2010. 

I have no history with this shirt, but it comes with its own, albeit that of a simulacrum - that very modern form of provenance in a branded garment: its fabric is a reproduction from Turnbull & Asser's first swatch book.  

125 years ago, Victorian men wore shirts with this exact pattern on them. 

The shop manager said that this was one of the tamer designs in the book. How amazing to think of the emergent middle class, grown newly fat on industry, wearing such colourful shirts. What of the buttoned-up-tight plain raiment we expect from the Victorians, as they dressed the erotic turnings of table legs? Then again, perhaps 'Walter' was wearing one of these shirts as he twitched at his desk penning eleven volumes of "My Secret Life"...

A morning coat

Another WG Jennings creation, made for my grandfather in the early 1950s.  

My father (who wore it for 30 years before me) said you could always tell who was wearing their own morning coat because it wouldn’t fit; and he enviously spoke of a friend whose hand-me-down coat was ‘green with age’. Ironically, this is in perfect condition, and fits as if it were made for me.  

However, it has a serious downside: it is wildly, Britishly, impractical for summer wear, made of a heavy cloth that could probably stop a bullet. I wore this to a wedding in Burgundy during a July heatwave, and fainted in the front pew before the rest of the congregation had even arrived. My horrified then-girlfriend drove me back to the hotel, where I flopped on the bed for several hours in my underpants, before abandoning the coat in favour of a shabby linen suit for the rest of the day. 

With any luck, if people are still compelled to wear morning coats to weddings when my son is grown-up, it will at least have started to turn green. 

A pair of shoes

A pair of Fat Shoes designed by Ian Reid, who was apprenticed to John Moore, the most original shoe designer of the 1980s. These were made for me about a decade ago on the original last, by Daita Kimura at The Old Curiosity Shop.

When I bought them, I wanted rubber soles to protect them, so I took them to my local cobbler - a Greek Cypriot called Michael who smoked more than any other man I’ve met. When I went to pick them up, there was a notice on the door saying that anyone who wanted to collect their shoes should return the following week. When I returned, his son explained that his father was gravely ill, and the shop would now be closed. He wouldn't take over the business, having just graduated from London University.   

When he gave me the shoes, he laughed and said that his father had talked about this ‘pair of clown shoes’, which is exactly what they look like. How nice that my shoes could make a man laugh even as his father lay dying, as he carried out his last obligations. 

A silk scarf

 

My grandfather’s evening scarf, given to me in my 20s by my grandmother. 

Worn only with a dinner jacket, and then only when cold enough for an overcoat; knotted once for the walk between car and party, then again in reverse at the end of the night. At most, this happens twice a year. Even by the time my son gets his hands on it, it will have been used for just a matter of hours, despite being 60 years old or more. Its long life has been measured out with short dark walks and steppings-out of cabs.  

But the result is magical: I have appreciated every minute that its heavy ivory silk has touched my skin, and I can say that about no other item of clothing. A five-foot length of fabric, cut, stitched and bought by the dead, whose purpose is only to beautify an evening’s liminal minutes and the otherwise non-spaces between travel and celebration. It is the most un-usual garment that I own.

A suit jacket

A jacket made for my father by WG Jennings, in 1968.  

This is actually part of a three-piece suit, but head-to-toe check is something I couldn't pull off; I’d look like a clownish advertising exec doing ‘eccentric’, or a deranged bookie. But as an odd jacket, it’s electric. The combination of cut and fabric really gets in people’s faces - in the nicest sense, of course.  A slightly nipped waist, slightly roped shoulders, slightly narrow lapels, and slightly short in the body; it looks perfectly modern, and it fits like a cliched glove.  

How proud I am that while hippies were flopping around in Hyde Park getting stoned to the Mick & Keef show, my father was swaggering around town in this absolute beauty.  Real style really is timeless.  

A loud shirt

A Richard James shirt, bought 15 years ago. I wore it twice before I realised you could only wear it once; otherwise people say, “he’s wearing that shirt again.”

Any likelihood of my ever wearing it again evaporated when it became the fashion-stylist’s choice for a mid-to-late-90s moment. Weeks after I bought it, both Jarvis Cocker and Noel Gallagher were on magazine covers wearing this shirt. So, it probably remains the most expensive ‘cost-per-wear’ item I own; either this or a ghastly man-blouse from Gieves and Hawkes with an over-printed rose motif, which my wife forcefully suggested I never wear again.  As soon as I get myself organised, that’s going on eBay.  For God’s sake, don’t buy it; it’s ludicrous, and you will never wear it.

A shaving brush

Found in a cupboard this morning, this derailed my plan to speak of underpants and morning coats: my shaving brush, from Taylor’s; only ever used with a pewter dish of unperfumed soap from Truefitt & Hill.  A seven-year beard has made them long redundant.

Briefly, they were tools for an intimate task I could never have imagined while turning them over in my hands in the panelled shops of St James’s. Silver-grey stubble roughening slackening, papery cheeks in a dull-pink hospital room. He would never go so long again without a shave.

This is a test that you must not fail; yet you will.  Removing the prickles that reddened the skin in the dried-spit corners of his mouth; it was too hard. Good enough would have to do; to do it again would do no good.  

Malt whisky and water wiped on his lips with a miniature sponge on a stick; a dangling bag on the bed-frame, gathering liquor the colour of 15-year-old scotch, drawn from a barrel charred on the inside.  The too-warm air was thick with him, as he dissolved a little more with each breath.  Trying not to breathe him in, I pulled the blades through the soap between the rise and fall of my breath, just like shooting a gun.  

   “Having to dab and work
    Closer than anybody liked
    But having, for all that,
    To keep working.”  

              Seamus Heaney, The Butts 

When I asked the barber if the badgers were harmed to get the brushes' bristles, he replied, “Well, I don’t think they hold the badgers down and shave them, sir.” 

A leather belt

An army-issue belt, from the mid-1950s.

Almost a decade after my father’s death, I found this in my parents’ garage, hung from a hook with a machete and golok; both were blunt, and as old as the belt. The maker’s name is illegible, but the government arrow remains, along with the year it was made: 1945.

There is a drawn-out archaeology of grief, as objects with unknown histories emerge from boxes, drawers and wardrobes. Their origins and use are inferred or construed from the signs of wear that remain; they tell cryptic, trivial stories, which can change what we know of the dead.  

That it was hanging in the garage suggests it was used to hold up gardening trousers; these, along with the gardening jacket, were also fifty-year-old kit: faded olive-green reverse sateen. Robust, hardwearing, both saw out their owner; his surname still sewn to the breast; stitchholes from long-gone insignia still yawning slightly on the epaulettes.  

The leather was dry and brittle when I found it, suggesting it had been unused for years. You age, you thicken round the middle; you no longer need the belt to stay your trousers. You take it off one day and without thinking, hang it on a hook next to the workbench. You will never touch it again. 

Soakings and smoothings of neatsfoot oil have brought it back to life. But back to what life? At what prior point in its life did it look like it does now? The answer of course, is never. 

A French shirt

“I have said you can have too many clothes. But I take that back where shirts are concerned. The shirt is a triumph of modern life, like the automobile or the web.

"It is easy to put on and take off, quick to wash and easy to store. Plus, shirts look great. A man should own as many shirts as he wishes - the more the better.

"I personally have so many shirts that I sometimes walk into my closet, pull one out, and think to myself, “Now where did that come from?” Having lots of shirts will allow you to surprise yourself with your own good taste.” Luciano Barbera

Whenever I see this shirt, bought in 2000 from Charvet on the place Vendome, I surprise myself at having let emotion over-rule my taste: I was still young, and blinded by the uncanny aura of the brand. 

I should have trusted my eyes: this shirt is a big bag of overpriced Gallic wrong. Beautiful fabric; but a small, too-mean collar with a cheap-looking shape that goes convex when worn, cramping the slimmest of ties; and the buttons have parallel stitching, leaving their centres naked; I hate that. Soft spread collars, cross-stitched buttons, God's in his heaven.

The day I bought this, I was caught out by bad packing and heavy rain, and wore a North Face parka with narrow APC jeans, combat boots, and a Turnbull & Asser candy-stripe shirt: a bizarre city-boy/hooligan/drug-dealer trifecta. According to my French then-girlfriend, I looked “a total plouc”, which might explain why the shop assistant was so reluctant to help.  Or maybe he didn’t like the shirts either. 

A child's watch

My first watch; bought for me by my parents.

Looking at it makes me feel old and sad; it is so small, but I feel crushed by it.  I cannot conceive having been that young.  

I remember a tantrum in my mother’s car on the first day of nursery school; a poem, a king and a milk-maid; a plastic school-jug of water in Summer; the blackbirds’ elderberry-purple shit on my seventh-birthday white tent; and then what?  

Once, I had only one watch; it had a picture of Snoopy on it, and his front legs were its hands. It was never right, but that wasn’t the point. Its purpose was an adult inculcation: not to tell the time, but teach it.  To learn to tell the time is to learn you will lose everything. 

A pair of Thai fisherman's trousers

October 1992.   Law degree in hand, I trudged miserably towards a career as a barrister;  then overslept on the first day of bar school.  Fate had spoken.  

Three days later, Fred called me up and asked if I would play guitar in the band he and his brother had formed.

Some months later, his brother insisted we all wore these for our first gig, at the Bull and Gate in Kentish Town.  I recall refusing and wearing something else; but the truth may be so painful that my memory is fooling itself.  

Sadly, it seemed the world was unready to embrace our particular strain of English angst-rock.  Looking at the trousers and listening to the songs today, I think I know why.

A denim jacket

And what a denim jacket.  Junior Gaultier, bought in Paris in January 1989, from Kiliwatch in the rue St Denis.

John K and I were staying in the rue Jean Jacques Rousseau, and in the evenings, we went clubbing. A regular favourite was Le Palace, which was the second of literally only three clubs that were worth a shit; and even then, you had to pick your day (I like Prince; but only the truly deranged would want to spend literally the whole of Tuesday night dancing to his music).   

So, to a night called Pyramid; two blokes called Colin Faver and Laurent Garnier were dj-ing. On the door, the ice-queen with pre-Raphaelite curls was wearing a full-length polo-neck Arran-wool Gaultier dress. She turned away every person in front of us, then took one look at this jacket and waved me in (a very different reaction from the abuse it would get in the streets of London).  

Then she saw John, and was giggles and disbelief.  

He was wearing a pair of destroyed chinos whose hem swung a good three inches above Swiss-cheese socks and Dr Marten’s shoes (this was years before Thom Browne went Pee-Wee-Herman. Then it was a sure sign you were missing from a secure psychiatric unit); a Schott Perfecto zipped to the chin, underneath a tatty flasher’s mackintosh (Aquascutum, no less); and on his head, half a pot of Wave-and-Groom and a battered cotton trilby, the brim turned back on itself. Together, the true style of following your own path ad absurdum.

Of course she let him in; here was a look that could liquify tall buildings in its wake. And when the last DJ played “Buffalo Stance” at 7am the next morning, John was still dancing in his leather jacket and mac, his hat bunched tightly in his hand. A gentleman always removes his hat.