Well my attempt at a fitter me has been slightly derailed by overdoing it last week and resulting in a (thankfully appearing transient) back problem. I’m less worried about having to put a break on the weights work than being unable to run for a few days, as the part of me that expects every aspect of my life to hurtle towards a car crash at some point worries about the loss of fitness and an expectation that my weight will suddenly increase rapidly overnight.

Ah – yes, weight issues. I have always had a problem with my weight, from a child to the present day. There was a brief period in the late nineties/early 2000s when a combination of exercise and a better diet had dropped my BMI out of ‘overweight’ into normal but apart from that I have always carried more weight than I should have with all the accompanying – for me at least – body image issues.

I do not remember a time I has not fat as a child. And I was fat. The bullies at school were always there to remind me after all. The reasons for this were multiple. First off is that I’m my own worst enemy, with a personality that tends towards excess and a n aversion to the concept of rationing. Unfortunately for me, I was born into a loving family for whom showing love included never being hungry. So, I was fed well at home, and fed even more at grandparents. As an example, every Sunday was spent at grandparents and went along the same lines; large cooked breakfast in the morning, followed by the inevitability of Roast Pork and overcooked vegetables and tinned peaches and ice cream before everyone sat down in front of the TV and fell asleep leaving me to do my homework in peace. But about two hours later it was Teatime, so of course out came the sausage rolls, apple pie and scones and although no one could have been even remotely hungry to not at least attempt to eat some of it was unthinkable if my Dad was going to avoid a falling out with his mother.

And of course, by the time we got home it was supper time.

The real curse of this type of scenario is that you get used to it and it becomes a vicious cycle and that was how it worked as I just began to get larger and larger. Add to the equation that I hated sport at school anyway (and with my ever-increasing size proceeded to hate it more and more as I became even more useless and increasingly feeling the shame of my size in the mandatory communal showers meant that by the time I was fifteen I weighed fifteen stone; and I knew that a year earlier that had been fourteen. I was putting on a stone in weight every year.

Panic can be a good thing sometimes. I proceeded at this point to panic and started to cut back on what I was eating as best I could and take the dog for longer walks. It was not easy ducking the scones and pies but I managed it well enough to stop the progression and reverse it a little, although it still dogged me through university and still today; if it was not from my running I think I would be in a much worse place, so here’s hoping I stay injury free for a while so maybe I can get closer to a place where I feel good about myself.

I was somewhat amused that I wrote this blog only to find this news story on the BBC the same day, entirely coincidently http://www.bbc.com/news/health-40921856 so I’d better get my running shoes back on…

Last week was an unusual but satisfying one for us due to one rather unusual factor. We had someone else living with us. Just for about a week, admittedly, but there was another living, breathing human being in our house at bedtime and in the mornings and through the day. We are used to people being with us at weekends of course, but for an extended period? No, this was something new.

And something good too. One of our God children was staying with us while the rest of his family were otherwise engaged, so we had the joy of taking a thirteen-year-old for waffles, milkshakes, Roman ruins and watching 1980s fantasy/science fiction movies with popcorn in the evenings before bed.

I am not sure who was enjoying themselves more if I have to be entirely honest.

Now reflecting on the experience, it has taught me several things about myself that if you had asked me before I probably would have not considered. For example, I always thought of myself as being relatively patient; now I know that I can be remarkably impatient at times – good to know, easier to manage when you’re aware of a flaw. I also thought that with children, I would be the soft touch that would let them get away with anything. No, wrong again. I’m much more of a rule based disciplinarian than I thought I was, and the Lovely Wife turns out to be the good cop (I will say, as his parents will be reading this, bad cop wasn’t needed as he behaved impeccably, but I suddenly understood the terrible truth).

Of course, the most interesting thing was that, for a short time at least, we had acquired a child. When we started going out we were clear that we both wanted to have children. I was always convinced I was going to have a couple of daughters. I do not know why; it just was that way in my head. I even know what I would have called them. After we were married we were both convinced it could only be a matter of time. Life up to that point was a blessed one, with lovely things happening to us at what seemed exactly the right time. So, I was convinced that this would be no different and soon we would be worrying about schools and the like.

Then, after a while it became clear that nothing was happening. But we prayed, and we took it further practically by going for IVF. Walking through White City to the Hammersmith hospital became a regular appointment.

After the third failed cycle of treatment it was clear it was not going to happen and there is a point where you must consider the health of the adult over a diminishing chance of success. Even at this point we still had some hope – stories of couples conceiving after giving up because of the sudden lack of stress of expectation kept the flame alive for a while.

But it was not to be, and we had to face the fact that sometimes you do not get what you want, no matter how hard you try. Sometimes you want kids and will not get kids, just as the dream spouse may remain just that – a dream – for some people. That’s a hard thing to get hold of, especially if you have a faith. We struggled and still struggle. It is something you never get away from, it does not and cannot ‘heal’.  You work around it. Luckily for us, we had each other and because it hurt us both badly it meant our relationship remained strong (I would also note the support of our friends and family through this; sometimes in unexpected ways.)

Being childless does have its benefits. As with the visit of our God son we find that many of our friends want us to be involved in some way in their children’s upbringing (ensuring that our diary gets increasingly complicated, if only so we remember all their birthdays). Working with the youth at church not only gave us contact with some lovely young people at exactly the most stressful part of the whole process, and has unexpectedly led to some very special – and sustained – friendships that we cherish (not to mention the pride and joy of seeing those young people excel and develop in their own lives and feeling we have at least some little assistance in that).

Not being worn down by the more tiring aspects of bringing up children means we have the energy for it at friends and family gatherings – rare is the case that a summer BBQ does not end with me buried under a pile of giggling children (it just always seems to happen).

What we have and what we have been given to work with is still a lot – in the end we are still very blessed. We will continue to love other people’s children who are entrusted to us when we can. We can joke about having all the fun with them and then giving them back when they get tired and emotional.

But when I see a little girl clinging to her father with utter love and trust, I cannot help but cry a little inside that I will never experience that very special kind of love.

It is true however that if that little girl happens to glance over at me it is almost certain that I will pull a silly face and probably stick my tongue out at her. You cannot take the child out of the man, thankfully.

Yesterday I had my induction at a local gym that I have somewhat reluctantly decided should be a place I probably need to be more familiar with.  I’ll be clear right from the outset that I hate gyms. The reasons are multiple but even the basic concept – that people should pay good money for the privilege of torturing yourself on a regular basis on machines that would not look out of place in a medieval torture chamber (and indeed have the capacity for causing similar levels of pain). I don’t get it. For me personally they remind me of school gyms too much of the time, places I think of as a place of overweight teenage humiliation as, naked except for the regulation blue trunks, that I was forced to learn how to do a forward role ‘properly’, a futile exercise that taught me nothing I ever needed and rubbed the skin raw on my shoulders.

It is not the exercise, anyone who knows me I run most days and it is an important part of my life – and keeps me at least in touching distance of what might be called reasonably fit. It is just the nature of the gym environment that makes me self-conscious and a bit uncomfortable, especially if the place is busy. For those of us who fall something short of the body beautiful it is hard to feel you are being judged and assessed. It should not matter of course, but equally we all know it is quite hard to feel/avoid feeling what we should. The little voice at the back of your head is unfortunately quite persuasive and knows exactly how to press your uncertainty and self-conscious buttons.

So back to the induction at the gym. Why? Considering the obvious level of distaste, I do seem to be being inconsistent. In the end though this became a bit of a change that needed to be made. I have been a member of gym a couple of times before and the experience was not a bad one.  In fact, when I was lucky enough to have a small, quiet pay as you go gym across the road from where I was living at the time I was in there most nights (but then of course I was a lot younger and single). What I do recall is that after a while I could feel the benefits and it helped back up my running by addressing the areas that could not. It seems clear to me that based on my current level of fitness if I want to improve my running times – and while I am hardly competitive – I need to shakeup what has become too much of a routine of the same runs at the same pace and that building myself a more holistic exercise programme, with a few races planned before the end of the year to aim towards seems to be the way to go. So, that means extending my runs, adding intervals and hill reps (which are hateful but effective in building strength, which I learned from my marathon training a few years ago) and the gym to work on upper body and core are now on the horizon and based on the induction where the very nice young chap who introduced me to the various items of torture managed just about not to laugh at my inability to do press ups I certainly need to get working on stuff.

Time will tell if it is going to be a fad or I’ll actually make it stick, and I’ll never make it onto the cover of ‘Men’s Health’ (thank goodness) but maybe I’ll feel a bit better about myself and hopefully allow me to ignore some implications from the sad reality of my actual age.

In the last few days, deep into a rather silly card game I was suddenly accused of being too competitive. While admittedly I had almost sunk my claws into a fellow player to lay my card down before theirs and therefore further my aim of winning at least that round, but in fact I was somewhat taken aback by the statement.

I never have thought of myself as being competitive. I think that this largely stems from a childhood that had two main reasons why I never grew up thinking about competition. First I was an only child. As such I did not have to compete for attention or anything else for that matter – although the biologist in me is knocking at the back of my head and reminding me that all offspring compete with their parents if only to maximise attention (versus that attention going elsewhere). Secondly, I was so gloriously unfit and from a household where the only physical exercise came from walking the dog (my job) and mowing the lawn (yes, me again). At school, I was completely used to being humiliated and last at pretty much any physical activity, bar a very brief period around twelve/thirteen where my early onset puberty meant that by sheer size I could compensate for lack of speed on the rugby field sometimes literally crushing the opposition before me. Then everyone else caught up and it stopped being fun again. Therefore, I hated competitive games and saw them mainly as something you needed only to survive them as best that you could.

Even now, while I love my running, I am an antisocial runner and rarely run with anyone. I’m not interested in being faster or going further than anyone else – the only person I am competing with is me.

At primary school, I was often at the top of the class and was accustomed to being the one with the best results. That area of competition soon stopped too when I ended up at Newcastle Royal Grammar where mid table respectability on the academic front suddenly seemed to be my destiny. This was even further emphasized when, after scraping into Oxford, you suddenly realise that everyone is brighter than you. It is quite a shock. You do your best to cope, get a decent degree and reserve any thoughts of competition to the playing of board games; come to think of it even there I can largely recall every single victory as there were so few of them.

Being uncompetitive at games or even at studies is one thing – one is entirely optional fun and the other you can work around usually; when it relates to love, it can be much harder to handle. My initial explorations into the weird and twisty world of romance were an unmitigated disaster. Not content with getting dumped by email after only a few weeks by my first girlfriend, I then managed to waste the next couple of years trying to ‘win her back’.

Yes, I know, I had to learn, OK? I’m not good at letting go.

I made the mistake of thinking that by generally treating her like a princess and generally doing anything she wanted (I hate to even think of the money, time and tears I spent) that I could somehow compete with the succession of boyfriends she went through. Each time she used one up I was convinced that this time it would be different, her eyes would be opened, heavenly music would come down from on high and all would be wonderful again. But no. Another man gets ahead of me – and when that man is at least 20 years older than me, that feels like a punch to the stomach. With a razor-sharp knuckle duster.

It didn’t work in the end of course, almost never does; you cannot make someone love you –  no matter how much you put yourself through in trying to change that someone’s heart. I know this now, but that was a lesson that had to be learned through pain.

So, competitive? Me? Surely not.

Nonsense. Of course, I’m competitive. We all are. We all have egos that we need to feed although we might not think about it consciously. We want attention. We want to be loved. We like to succeed and to win. It feels good and often we get more from the joy of the act of winning then we do from the prise itself. Equally, when we feel we have lost out it can be the worse feeling in the world, especially when what we have lost is something precious.

All we can do is keep competing, enjoy our victories when we have them and hope that at the end of the day we have done better than break even.

So, I could not have asked for a larger contrast than Sao Paolo as I was driven from the airport into the centre of Brasilia. As I left Sao Paulo the last of many phases of habitation that surrounded the roads and stretched off into the distances as far as the eye could see was a ramshackle collect of walls and roofs, huddling together for mutual support and I presume sheltering as best they can many, many people.

Around the airport at Brasilia, there was nothing of the sort. Here it was parched park land with palms, new roads with relatively little traffic one them and a feeling of relatively newness; correct considering the Brazilian capitol was only inaugurated in 1960.

As the taxi coasted down the boulevards to the business hotel and meeting rooms that would be this week’s home, I noticed that the main road thoroughfare seemed to be closed to traffic – this was a Sunday – and instead populated by a smattering of walkers, joggers and people on bikes. Compared the hustle and bustle of Sao Paolo it all seemed very quiet and sedate, and largely proved to be over the coming days, at least in comparison – although crossing Brazilian roads is still an exercise in speed, courage and possible the odd prayer at times depending on just how many lanes you must scamper across.

In retrospect, I would summarise the difference between the two cities as being wrapped up in what they are about. As noted last week, Sao Paulo seems to me a place where the most important thing are the people who live there themselves. In the case of Brasilia, it is not about individuals or the mass of humanity, but about how Brazil wants to project itself and its institutions. If you look up any of the buildings – most designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer – they are indeed impressive, even if you do not happen to be a fan of concrete. They are making bold statements and in most cases, at least adhere to my personal view that functional buildings do not (and should not) be boring. Though it was hard at times to get away from influences of the period in which they were designed – on of my favourites, the National Museum Honestino Guimaraes, to my reckoning does look like a spaceport as imagined perhaps in a post Star Wars cheap rip off. Nothing wrong with that, by the way. Next to it, the cathedral is a stunning piece of work, causing you to enter down a dark tunnel only to emerge into a huge light auditorium where monumental metal angels cascade down towards you in a scene reminiscent of many medieval ceiling paintings.

There was a second thing that in Brasilia struck me as different from Sao Paulo. In the latter, I was forced to spend most of my exercise time on treadmills as the part of the city I was in was not conducive to running. In Brasilia, the city park, a huge parched thing provided ample (if hot) opportunity for slow jogging. For me, having to go slow by necessity of the conditions had the advantage of allowing me to see many of the diverse bird species that share the park, from little ovenbirds, flycatchers, caracara or my personal favourite, the incredible cute burrowing owls. The zoologist in me was worried that I was not going to experience any of Brazil’s wildlife, but while it was not exactly a trip down the Amazon, at least it was a nice taster. So, Brasilia, for me, not about the people, but about the country and the identity it would like to project, set in a landscape while the owls look on unimpressed before vanishing down a burrow.

I have had the bonus of being sent to Brazil in the last few weeks for business meetings. There are some advantages to working for an international company. The meetings I am attending are/were – I am still here as I write – in Sao Paolo and Brasilia. The cities could not be more different based on my admittedly limited experience when I have could escape from my hotel and while both places have problems as far as I am concerned there have been things to enjoy. I feel the need to share impressions of both, starting with the better known.

First a bit of personal background. I have never been to anywhere in South America or Brazil before so this was all new to me and I was not entirely sure what to expect. In the back of my head I was wondering if my brief experience of the Philippines (a couple of days in Manila) might be somewhere near the mark due to there also being a mix of historical European influence mixed with something indigenous and unique and I think there were a few things that struck me as similar. But I certainly found lots of things that were new to me.

Sao Paolo is a mass of humanity. Apparently, it is the largest city in the Southern hemisphere and I can quite believe that. As I arrived and the pick-up took me to the hotel the city seemed to sprawl around me, starting out with very low grade housing and gradually getting more substantial as you approached the centre. It was very clear to me from the outset that poverty is rife here and over the time I was there the number of people who were living on the streets was much higher than I had experienced before and was quite effecting. When you walk through London you see plenty of homeless people admittedly, but here it was groups and on every corner, especially in the old centre of the city, which is naturally where I gravitate towards considering my interest in history. The centre did not disappoint me. There was no particular thing that I would point to – the massive cathedral, while impressive, is relatively modern, and the little seventeenth century church nearby, which was empty and quiet was far more memorable. But I enjoyed walking around the city very much and I was wondering why until it dawned on me that it was not the buildings, but the people. The sheer number of people, the noise and kerfuffle, from the hosts of young people twittering around to the shouts and the whistles of the men trying to persuade drivers to park in their specific private garage (it took me a while to work out what all the shouting was about). The atmosphere is rich, even if parts of the city are not. I also found most of the people to be friendly and helpful. This is a place where people live – which was quite a shock when I got to Brasilia, but more on that next week.

The one concern was that I felt I was getting wall to wall warnings on the levels of crime and petty theft from everything I read or everyone I spoke too; and to be blunt, it is overkill. Of course, you need to apply common sense and be aware of what is going on around you, but in public areas I do not think the risk is much more than in parts of London. In fact, I am probably more at risk back home due to complacency through familiarity. Most people, no matter how poor they are, are decent and not a threat. At times, I was too much looking over my shoulder having had the risks drummed into me to fully enjoy the experience of this city, which is a shame. But in the end as I flew to Brasilia it was the overall impression of a place, rather than a specific monument or site that would remain with me.

I do like to walk and while I am away in Brazil at this moment long walks with the Lovely Wife are something I definitely miss a lot. I can and will walk – I need to keep the level of physical activity up, and sometimes (as now, in Sao Paulo) the place you are in does not support running and I detest treadmills so avoid them at all possible. At home, there are advantages to spending a lot of time wandering around where you live, and investigating those footpaths between houses that you had not really noticed before. It provides a certain kind of delight to realise how sometimes they all connect up with each other or provide short cuts to going via the road, one things footpaths should always do is give the pedestrian an advantage over the vehicle in getting to the final destination in as short and as sneaky a way as possible. It also helps me build a network of traffic avoiding runs (much more pleasant and indeed safer) and finally allows you to better understand where things are in relation to each other, which can be helpful even if you are driving, especially in a town where some or other part of it seems to be constantly being dug up, accompanied by the joys of the four-way light control.

Outside your normal sphere of influence however something more circumspect is probably needed for people like me who have a tendency to saunter innocently through neighbourhoods with an air of genuine curiosity without much thought about the fact I’m an obvious British tourist (something which I believe is quite clear even from a distance) and that there are some places that curiosity is not actually very welcome. There have been times when I have been happily striding along and then stopped looking at the architecture and realised that what would be the most sensible thing would be to walk a little faster and more determinedly to remove myself from a situation that suddenly made me feel vulnerable and a little nervous. You probably know that feeling; you might not actually be in any danger but you are suddenly ‘out of place’ so the little alarm bell in the back of your head tells you to get a move on.

Most of the time my walks have been entirely positive. Recent wanders around Singapore (slow ones; we adopted the moniker ‘Singapore stroll’ to describe the slightly more careful stride a cold loving boy from Northern England should employ to survive in that constant heat and humidity). When I was in Japan many years ago I  walked for miles in loops from train stations and was amazed at how quickly with some of the smaller towns twenty minutes of solid walking got you away from the concrete and technology and threw you back a hundred year or so, with older ladies quietly working their paddy fields as this slightly weary Westerner walked past soaking the atmosphere up, only to mutter something under his breath after a bit of watch checking and suddenly hightail it back the way he had come, as the one drawback for being on foot is that quite often it talked that bit longer to get anywhere than perhaps you thought it would; to be avoided where at all possible, as let’s be honest, a forced march to catch the last train is never as much fun as a steady relaxed walk.

It is funny sometimes how certain books and stories hang around long after they have become completely outdated. I was thinking about this at the weekend after going to the West End production of ‘Wind in the Willows’ at the Palladium. I am fan of musical theatre anyway and there is some good stuff in the West End if people are similarly inclined; the musical version of ‘School of Rock’ is tremendous fun for example, and the current revival of ‘42^nd Street’ is positively exhausting to watch as the tap dancing is superb, constant and full on. I am also a fan of the work of George Stiles and Anthony Drewe whose work is positively charming, if a little silly. The additional songs they provided to the stage version of ‘Mary Poppins’ and more recently ‘Half A Sixpence’ are by far my favourite songs from those productions. On their own though, I do feel they get a bit bogged down in their own cleverness to deliver a cheese laden rhyme a bit too often.

But I heartily enjoyed ‘Wind in the Willows’ as it has too much charm not leave you with a smile on your face and the cast give it all they can as this is not the kind of production that fits well with subtle. At its best it almost descends into Monty Python farce – notably as Mr Toad is chased by the not very competent forces of law following his escape from prison disguised as a washer woman – and the weasels are having too much fun being bad (but not too bad, this is after all a family show).

But coming back to my opening; ‘Wind in the Willows’ is so wonderfully outdated in so many ways. That’s perhaps not surprising since the book dates from 1908. It is all about a weird world of animals that reflects our own through the anthropomorphism with loads of unsubtle subtext on class, which, being form 1908, ends up with the idiot aristocracy back in charge and very little changed despite the defeat of the uprising of the arguably working class mob (something that the musical version pulls out well – the folk of the Wild Wood really believe that they have a right to Toad Hall, which Mr Toad of course takes completely for granted).

So why does it sustain? I think two main reasons for me. The first is to anchor the story with central core of the friendship and camaraderie of the characters of Toad, Ratty, Mole and Badger; this is the core of the book and strongly – perhaps a tad too strongly – played out in the musical version, through song obviously. The message is a simple explanation of something rather more complex; if someone is a friend, you stick by them through thick and thin, even if they are sometimes really, really, annoying.

Secondly for me, it is the fantasy element which allows some of the outdated attitudes that are present by virtue of the date of writing to be absorbed into the imagined parallel animal world which clear is not trying at all to contain any form of realism; although I have to say that all the stuff in the story about cars, in 1908 still very new, still seems valid today, dare I say it pushing part of this into the speculative fiction field– the idea of some idiot terrorising the countryside in the search for speed without care for their own life or anyone else’s whether it be human or hedgehog is something we have probably all experienced at some point. Unlike the world of Mr Toad though, consequences in our world can be a lot worse.

Considering just how hot it is here in the UK now, as I swelter trying to type this out with hot sticky fingers it amuses me that over the last couple of days I have been reminding myself of spending three hours freezing cold early on a July morning last year. The Lovely Wife and I took the opportunity of seeing my Dad for Father’s Day to stop off on the way back to see the small but interesting ‘Skin’ exhibition in Hull. The core of this are some of the finished photos from Spencer Tunick’s ‘Sea of Hull’ series of installations photographed last year, in which I participated, along with over three thousand other insane people. The photos are impressive and I’m rather proud to be in them, even if, to be honest, I am a tiny bluey-green blob buried somewhere among a mass of (variably) bluey-green blobs. The final works are quite impressive, even pretty (the Lovely Wife agrees) which is somewhat different impression on the day as it is rather difficult to work out what something like this will look like when you are participating. Individual brush strokes cannot see what the final picture will look like.

Around the time most comments I received other than ‘you’re mad’ where related to the whole concept of being naked around so many strangers.  Personally, I think that is not actually a problem because the sheer mass of humanity just emphasises how diverse we are and how much clothing can be a barrier in a way to treating each other as human beings. I had lots of interesting conversations (you had to fill the time somehow) with complete strangers of both sexes and all ages, who just happened to be also naked and painted one of four shades of blue. There is quite a lively online community now where people have identified with the shade of blue they had been randomly allocated. I belong to the B3 brigade for the record. I think that the most embarrassment you can have regarding getting undressed is probably in the company of a handful of people that you know a bit, but are not close friends – like people you work with. Complete strangers; fine. Very good friends; probably OK. Bill from accounts? No thank you.

Obviously, I have no concerns in taking part in what is a piece of art, and would happily do something like this again, although I think that something this scale rarely comes along. I cannot say all the experience was enjoyable. The wind whistles off the North Sea mercilessly and while it was July we started in the early hours and finished about 7am, if we were not already painted blue then that probably would have been the predominant colour anyway. The whole thing lasted the best part of three hours, and I think that was a lot longer than many of us had anticipated. Finally, some parts of Hull have ground surfaces that might be long lasting and fine if you are wearing shoes but did not do nice things to bare feet.

While talking to the volunteer in the exhibition it appears a lot of participants have been through to look at the results. This is not that surprising as many of the participants came from the Hull area. One thing that was consistent is that many had the same views as I hold, in that they were happy they had taken part, and that it would be an experience that would stay with them (in a good way) for many years.

‘Skin’ is on at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull until August 13^th   and admission is free. https://www.hull2017.co.uk/whatson/events/skin-freud-mueck-tunick/

While I can I must put in a good word for Hull itself. It has a poor reputation which maybe historically was justified but we have been there three times in a relatively short period and been charmed by the friendliness of the people, some very good pubs (shout out for The Sailmakers Arms) and restaurants (very good tapas at Ambiente Tapas on Humber Road) and some interesting historical connections with William Wilberforce and the fishing industry – there is plenty to enjoy and during its ‘City of Culture’ year is probably the best time to visit if so inclined.

This week I will be attending several nice receptions and dinners as part of the kind of work I do at Industry level. I work in an industry that employs a lot of scientists and people I would describe (entirely positively) as having interesting and wide ranging experiences so they are usually quite fun affairs (although clearly the food and wine always helps). I have been lucky enough to be attending these sorts of things for over a decade now, but I am struck by how things have changes and fell into a bit of a reflection on whether changes were for good or ill.

About a decade ago, such a do would have been much more formal. It would be black tie for a start. Now let me quickly explain, because not everyone gets what I mean here. I was lucky enough to get into Oxford (I’ll be frank – I used the word lucky – or if you prefer, blessed –  as I am not bright enough but was good at exams and essay writing under pressure, which fitted the entrance system at the time. If I had to compete on the level people do now, with the grades that are required at a minimum I doubt I would have got in; but hey, it is now a matter of history). Going to that kind of institution teaches you somethings about dress code quite quickly. For example, certainly in the 90s (I mean the 1990’s although this could apply to any previous century come to think of it) if you turned up to your Final exams without the correct dress – dark suit, white shirt and white bow tie, gown and mortar board (although you could just carry that) you would not be allowed in and consequently fail. Not a great get up to take an exam in, especially in the heat of June 1992 (in my case). Half the problem was getting to exam halls on time as you are waylaid by enthusiastic tourists wanting to get a picture of themselves with funnily dressed and very stressed students. I do not know if this still the case – I suspect so. Things do not change quickly at such places.

Anyway, Industry dos – and work Christmas parties come to think of it – used to be Black Tie. Dinner jacket and dress trousers, dress shirt, black bow tie, and ideally a cummerbund to keep the gut in. It is an outfit designed to look smart and flatter, as much as is possible, even the most prestigious paunch – when correctly done. If you wanted to go a little further, then of course you must learn to tie your own bow tie – not a mean feat, but really, when is clip on anything classy? – and it is worth it as the evening moves on and becomes less formal you can undo it and go all a bit louche. If you can get a nice lady to undo it for you (and yes, I can testify many are up at least for this intimacy) then all the better.

I stopped wearing my Black-tie outfit to industry and work dos a long time ago mainly because I could see I was now in the minority. The abomination that is ‘lounge suit’ had taken over; basically, guys you just mean a normal business suit. Very sad, in some ways. I do sometimes dig out my white DJ and one of my bow ties because (1) I can tie it and the Lovely Wife likes to undo it and (2) In my fantasies this is the closest I look to James Bond – it’s enough Roger Moore for me anyway. But honestly I’ve given up now and frankly usually ditch the suit for smart trousers and a nice casual shirt; no one seems to mind; it means I get to carry less luggage and in some ways, it is more me… I have never been and never will be a Sharp Dressed Man. But part of me does feel that it all feels a little less special without the opportunity to dress up.