THE CLOTHES WE USED TO WEAR DON'T MATTER

A lot of excellent -some unique- clothes got totalled inside my home this winter, due to a (very localised) environmental disaster called rising damp. Super-cool, irreplaceable jackets (leather & other) were damaged beyond repair. (None of these things are pictured above, by the way, in case you think I've gone insane.) Fab shirts, desirable jeans, and far too many pairs of shoes and boots were swept into the unwearable bin. Dozens of items bit the dust. Boo hoo. I expect this triggers two reactions : (1) This dude cares too much about clothes, & (2) who gives a toss?. 

Bear with me, because I really don't care about them either. The death of those clothes represents nothing more than another brick through the window of enlightenment. Clothes, I've been thinking, are mostly flags we wave at the watchers, badges to bolster our egos, or advertisements that signal our loyalty to ideas we haven't examined closely. Yet, when the time comes, we may chuck our unwanted rags into a "charity" bin which in reality supplies an international rag-trade where our rejects sell for over £100 a tonne [click here for a video on that] 

As it happens  I spent a few years selling clothes for a living myself. It's a game, believe me, I know about clothes. One day I'll write the book. People -city people especially- are crazy about clothes. But we don't spend much time wondering why we need whole cupboards full of flags, badges and adverts.

We are all, to some extent, victims of fashion. It's very tempting (well it is to me) to be notably different and individual all the time and in everything you do - but you'll end up being the awful weirdo nobody wants near them. So we all take on enough of what everyone else is doing until they stop throwing rocks every time we appear. Fashion is powerful. An entire generation, for example, is now virtually incapable of speaking a complete sentence without thrusting in the word "like" at least once. Because, like, fashion. 

ZEBRAS NEED STRIPES

Fashion -which is protective camouflage by another name- drills down to the herd instinct that education was (once) designed to overcome. The entire rag-trade depends on endless repetitions of a paradoxical cycle that dictates large groups of people must assemble wearing the same thing in order to look special. In nature, of course, the uniformity is intentional for purposes of disguise. Nobody wants to be the zebra wearing polka dots when the lions come calling.

Nothing, of course, is as easy to manipulate as an insecure youngster desperate to belong. It is not coincidental that the woke brainwashing practised in schools and colleges has produced millions of fanatical dolts who hold precisely the same views endorsed by the establishment. The subconscious doublethink that persuades women to wear shoes that render walking impossible has been transplanted into the realm of "progressive" political thought. Nobody wants to be the dinosaur clinging to heteronormative meritocracy when all the "free-thinkers" are fluid, poly and commie. In the 21st century,they tell themselves they're attracting attention by vanishing into the crowd.

But political fashion comes at a high price. In the bizarro world of pay-as-you go tuition, if enough students parrot exactly the same noises as the "educators" and the government, it's called rebellion. To compound that joke, the degree which a teenager buys for a small fortune  is called a reward. And the worst-educated graduates in world history sincerely believe that banging their tin drums about racism, climate change and transgender hoopla makes them the resistance. This is the logic of wearing a hideously ugly suit every day for three years because it cost £20,000 so it must be good.

YESTERDAY'S GONE

Up is down, bad is good and globalist groupthink is revolution, in the addled anti-logic of the super twitter-troopers. In the culture war -the only kind these sweetpeas are capable of fighting- their personal survival (they kid themselves) is guaranteed because they're wearing the right ideas on their social media. Look, everybody! I retweeeted justice for George Floyd. Everybody's doing it!

Connoisseurs of state-planning will appreciate how cleverly the current crop of juvenile "protesters" and "activists" were steered towards a clutch of manufactured "crises" to head off their potential to challenge the patently absurd Covidian narrative. (It's much easier to protest against an "existential threat" than a very real crew of corrupt psychopaths).  I witnessed the clearest possible example of this in the first month of the 2020 lockdown. Instead of kicking up unholy hell at the prospect of house-arrest, students inhabiting the up-market flats put signs in their windows reading racism is the real pandemic. In Glasgow, for pity's sake. How dumb can they be? Glaswegians have a proud, unique and historic indifference to the arrival of ethnic minorities. We were far too busy waging war against each other to notice them.

WE WERE ALL YOUNG ONCE   

So the loss of a few bags of dated glad rags only mimics the inevitable loss of other, equally disposable things. Things that should be discarded, like the wafer-thin political ideals you had back when flared jeans seemed like a good idea.I may have grimaced at the sight of certain outdated t-shirts before they hit the bin, but Jesus H Christ, can you imagine finding an old phone containing the 3000 text-messages you exchanged with the dingbat you loved beyond all reason when you were fifteen in 2020? The past really is another country,

Old clothes don't tell you who you were, but who you pretended to be when your identity was still up for grabs. It's only a mental housekeeping task, casting the ragged remains of your former glory into the garbage, screwing up that once-delightful silk-shirt that hasn't fitted since 2002 when you learned how to cook more than one course. 

FIT FOR PURPOSE

The wardrobe's loss is the brain's gain. By 2003 I knew I'd tipped into overweight and soon switched to a world of daily physical challenges that -after a lot of effort- morphed my 50-year-old self into the fittest creature I'd been since I was seventeen. (When I was damn fit by the way, so tighten up, slackers!). 

Yesterday, however, I found two mouldy riding boots that rotted in the rising damp for more than a year because I have no horse of my own and the government wouldn't let me get on anbody else's. And next thing I found myself picturing some 50 year-old rooting through their heap of unused stuff in the year 2045. Will she find, at the back of a forgotten drawer, the riding gloves she wore on that final pony-ride in March 2020? Or maybe that first NHS-blue face-muzzle? Or perhaps the designer leopard-print mask that looked so jaunty in her teenage selfies...

But 2045 will be nothing like 2020. What will that 50 year-old woman look like, and how will she feel after (at least) another 75 anti-Covid vaccinations? How many more governmental  "health emergencies" will have wrecked the plans she made? What damage will 25 years of recurring lockdowns have wrought on her mind and body? She won't have grow up in a world where choosing your own ideas and ideals was like pulling a new shirt from the rail. 

It will be far, far too late for her to decide or declare that the government turned the free world into a prison in the name of "health". That game will have been lost while she was still a child. It seems agonisingly clear that by 2045 she will simply do whatever the hell she must to be allowed those tiny windows of freedom (if any) that remain. She will not, I suspect, dwell too much on fashion. As we all just found out, shoes and clothes -like facts and logic- don't matter when nobody gets to see them.

Ian Andrew-Patrick     

Spring is here at last, the sun is shining and no-one's more pleased than me. But I'm not about to waste my summer acting as if "normality" is about to resume. Anyone who thinks it will needs a wake-up call. Please explore this site -there's plenty of great stuff going back to 2019- and share any posts, links or info you find with anyone who needs that wake-up. Let's not kid ourselves - winter will see another full-on attempt to pen us up like naughty animals and this time we need to be prepared. Many thanks to everyone supporting this site and the struggle that we cannot afford to lose.