Men's dress rant

Not a good look

I hate summer. It brings out the worst things in life. The new Big Brother series. Ice Cream vans. And, God help us, mens’ legs. Especially old mens’ legs.

If I was Prime Minister, my top priority would be to make it an offence for men over 50 to wear shorts. Varicose veins and knees which look as if they’ve been put through a rock crusher would be classified as a threat to public health and morality and showable only in darkened rooms to a private audience. Failure to observe this would be an ASBO offence.

The wearing of sandals with uncut toenails, however, would incur the death penalty. Men would not be permitted to make like Rosa Klebs. If that’s your method of mowing the lawn, fine, but step out of the house like that, then – chop. I mean heads, not nails.

T shirts would grudgingly be permitted for males over 50, but only if no flesh is visible between the bottom hem and the belt. Having a beer belly which forces the bottom of the T shirt to nudge upwards would not be deemed an excuse. Exposure of pubic hair would be classified as Aggravated Navel Exposure - maximum penalty fifty lashes.

Now to the gravest matter of all. Today I saw a man, who shared Bill Nighy’s age group but not dress sense, with sagging man boobs, wrinkled arms and an underarm crow’s nest, wearing, and my trembling hands can barely type this, a Bruce Willis vest. Everything was revealed.

There’s only one solution for men like that. Stick their head on a pole and display it over London Bridge. It won’t look pleasant, but at least we won’t have to peer at the rest of their bodies.

All this is making me retch as much as it is you. I’m doing it out of pure public spiritedness. Make me PM and I pledge to enact all the above.

And then I’d go on to the lesser stuff such as eradicating poverty.