A White Shirt and the Space/Time Continuum

I have no wish to sound like a worn and bitter hack, sand-blasted by weltschmerz, but I don’t have many ambitions left.

It’s not like I want to write the Great Western Novel. Who the hell reads anymore? And all the stuff in other people’s bucket lists is either athletic or pathologically unimaginative. I blame adverts for this. Left with nothing interesting to say about their products, ads are now indiscriminate 30 second reels of yoga/skydiving/surfing/beaches/hiking/streetfood in Singapore or star-watching in Machu fucking Picchu. God we’ve become dull. Even our ‘wildest dreams’ are commoditised and fully predictable.

I think I only ever declared one ambition, publicly. It was around the time I graduated. I was to die as spectacularly as possible. Specifically, being smashed on top-grade narcotics, driving a GT40 through the safety barrier of the Great St. Bernard Pass and plummeting to a fiery doom while distracted by a hand-job from a young Angie Dickinson. That one still works for me as an ambition… though most of the parts are no longer available.

The only other thing I’m determined to achieve before that glorious end is, on the face of it, much simpler, yet practically, even less likely.

I want to wear a white shirt to dinner.

I’m not talking about going to a black tie event, where you flop the old soup-and-fish out of its bag, still redolent of wee and kippers from the last rout, and slip on the crisp, clean Marcellized dickie before hopping in a cab. That’s easy.

No… what I’m aiming for is that thing that Hollywood leading men have always pulled off so brilliantly. Standing on the red carpet in a dark suit. Regular white shirt open at the tanned neckline, collar tips tucked just inside the jacket so it doesn’t look like you’re showing off. But still enough flare to hint at a collar bone and understated musculature. Clooney does it to devastating effect (note to British celebrities… you look ridiculous if your teeth are whiter than your shirt).

I have the shirts. Certainly a few Brooks Bros in their sharp-as-a-tack, high thread-count Egyptian cotton. At least two collar styles. Some classic for the ‘I’ve just slipped my Sulka off’ look. Maybe a couple of subtle, but still possibly regrettable ‘cutaways’ for that ‘Rat-Pack’ vibe. I’ve got a few cotton Oxford button-downs too. For the preppy, Redford/McQueen thing. They’re in the wardrobe. Pristine. Pressed. Ready to go every morning.

I’ve tried. God know’s I’ve tried. But they never get through to the evening.

The first risk period is breakfast. I’ve rendered a shirt useless within 22 seconds of donning it with splashback from the coffee pot.

I know… helpful people squeal “quick… run it under cold water” and yes… it’ll lift the stain in a physical sense. But moisture… scrubbing will have destroyed, in one tiny patch, the starching, the sheen from the Hoffmann press. Nobody will see… but I will know. Christ I’d rather walk into a meeting with an unnoticed bogie hanging from my moustache, or a ‘Map-of-Ireland’ on my cavalry twills than a psychological weak point in the shirt.

Because of where I live, I have to travel to get anywhere. Travel requires carrying things. Bags with straps, backpacks. Things that press the shape out of shoulders. That’s even when they’re not heavy. Anything bulkier than a credit card and a mobile and suddenly your body betrays you with its own moisture. A seven minute saunter to the station in complete calm and you might have hope. Anything more hurried and you are slowly but surely degrading the shirt from the inside.

I don’t know why it is, but people can’t simply shut the fuck up about a cravat. Google up a picture of Cary Grant in casual ‘sportswear’. Open neck white shirt, the collar lined with a rolled Hermes to protect it from unbecoming perspiration as he glides around the tennis court. Perfection. But if you wear one, everyone will comment.

‘Oooh. A cravat’.

You know how, if you see a swan, someone has to say the thing about breaking your arm?

Seriously. Strangers will cross the street to point and say ‘A cravat!’. It’s entirely bewildering because, if you then ask ‘Yes. Do you like it?’ they’ll invariably look confused. Panicked. “I didn’t think I was supposed to have an opinion! You were wearing a cravat! I had to say something. It’s the law.”

Actually a cravat looks great… you just have to have balls of steel to wear one. Which is odd, thinking about it, because it’s precisely the opposite of what it’s telegraphing.

Returning to the matter at hand. If, hypothetically, I could have got off the train with the shirt intact, there would be lunch.

A white shirt has been part of a gentleman’s dress for countless centuries, but it’s only in maybe the last few decades that informal eating has made them impractical. Think, for a moment of any historical images of a man at lunch. Everyone from Beau Brummel to JFK. Always seated, always with knives and forks. God knows, I’m not complaining, but lunch in a big city today will come from an entirely unprecedented palette of ethnicities, with dozens of traditions for consumption.

A white shirt can’t even survive a bowl of spaghetti, at a table with napkins, let alone a hand-thrown bowl of fire-cooked Thai ‘Jungle’ curry, shovelled with sticks while perched at a bar and jostled by plaid-clad elbows. Pristine linens and ramen slurping cannot co-exist… and very definition of ‘street’ food is that you should be able to consume it with fingers and standing up. Though physics has yet to entirely catch up with my thinking, I’m pretty sure that the attraction between crisp, pressed cotton and any chilli-spiked oil is basically gravitational.

The more you think about it, the more absurd my ambition is. I want to be that guy, slipping onto the barstool at six, ordering a martini, and clocking just the faintest admiring glance for looking properly turned out, considered, put-together. But it can never be.

I’m trying to write a pitch at the moment. A radio documentary on the nature of time. No… seriously.

All that stuff about Time’s Arrow, and ‘you can’t unmake an omelette’ and entropy… and I’m beginning to realise that unless we can manage time travel, so I can step away from my wardrobe and immediately slide onto the barstool… then the passage of time and intervening entropy will always destroy the shirt.

Maybe George Clooney is a Time Lord!

Christ… that’s not where I expected to end up.