Dress Code

A propos of nothing in particular, in Sleepytown, just round the corner from where Austen and Sue live, and frequented I believe by one of the Housemates, is an interesting little clothing shop called Dress Code. There are many such singular shops in Sleepytown, you can imagine going into any of them and Matt Lucas and David Walliams serving you.

In Dress Code you can buy rubber garments, or pre-New Romantic Spandau Balletesque outfits. If you can imagine it you can probably buy it there. If you can't imagine it you can probably buy it there. For the longest time I did no more than peer in the window, merely imagining the interior, then one of my kids wanted to peruse the stock one day, so with a cool young person as my cloak of invisibility I ventured in and was not disappointed.

Dress Code features as part of the volunteer training for the Nature Park and yet the code itself is encoded.
We are supposed to talk to them about not wearing jeans and ripped stuff for presenting programmes to the public. That's all.
But the truth is that we do have an unspoken dress code. We all dress as though we are trying to emulate Steve Irwin. As soon as the sun shows its face we are into long shorts, almost always some version of khaki or olive, we wear the sturdy crocodile hunter shoes and the thick rambler's socks. In the office we have a whole stand full of green outdoors jackets and some cheaper version of a Tilley hat, the round brimmed hat (green of course) that you might expect to have corks hanging from it.

I don't feel the need to rebel against this dress code because I think it is what the school groups that come to the Nature Park expect. They want two things, a puppet show or sketch and someone to guide them round the trails who looks as though they know something about nature. I can live with that.

Ben came in to do the puppet show with me today. At the weekend he has had to practise puppeteering skills, and I must say he did a spectacular job.

So, in the big bad world outside, RasPutin is threatening us with a new cold war is he? Hmmm.... When I was at school, history went as far as the Cold War and to be honest, apart from keeping us on our toes in the Arms Race, I'm not sure we suffered too much from it, although as ever I will defer to my historian friends on this one. It seemed to be a bit like being sent to Coventry by a big country with a closed economy. Now it maybe that since that economy opened up, we are making a fortune from selling them willy warmers or something, who knows? And you could even argue that a Cold War actually provides stability in the world as no-one wants to unleash their big weapons. (Yes, yes, of course I meant it like that.) I think he should dress like that monk who wouldn't die, add a splash of colour.

On the subject of insane world leaders and suits at the same time, I highly recommend my friend Heelers' little sketch starring the mad, bad Ahmadinejad. I still can't spell his bloody name (traffic guy, not Heelers) so I just copied and pasted.