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However seriously men come to take themselves , they remain ten-year old boys at heart. Rambling aimlessly about some urban or village perimeters in
short trousers , like William and the Outlaws.(1) Splashing down streams , crossing railway lines , thrashing through dense tangles
of rhodedendron that surround an isolated and shuttered Edwardian villa , clambering about in abandoned quarries. Or indeed , setting up camp. The
association of tents with the Eighth Army’s long range desert group and with Himalayan mountaineering lend an adventurous flavour to sleeping under
canvas. Adult camping always contains an element of play , conjuring up the days of childhood. However unsuited they may be to his mature physique ,
doesn’t every man indulge a secret pleasure when he pulls on a pair of shorts ? There were also the boy scouts. Woggles , stamp-collecting , bugles ,
bob-a-job week , rope knots , hats with wide brims and those khaki shorts. All incomprehensible to twenty-first century youth , seeming quaint and
rather dodgy at the same time. Those improbable scoutmasters would be under tabloid surveillance nowadays , their scout huts surrounded by mobs who
thought some sort of paediatric shinnanikins (possibly involving mouth organs) were taking place within.
Comics occupied this ten-year old boy’s leisure hours in those pre-internet days. Sixty years after reading them , I can still picture many of their
characters. The Numskulls were a set of miniature chaps directing their much larger host's day-to-day activities from a brain department depicted as
a sort of airport control tower. From morning wake-up calls to gongs for supper , these miniscule homunculi prompted "their man" into invariably
bungled purpose. Limp Along Leslie was a football prodigy with a gammy leg , whose author cunningly introduced some voluntary work as a shepherd
(along with his border collie Pal) to break up the weekly football sequences. I caught up with the Jocks and the Geordies , a later addition to the
pantheon , via The Dandy which my two young sons read. Their weekly strip depicted incessant cross-border feuding , the Jocks easily identified by
their tartan sweaters and outsized tam o’shanter caps. One generic character was the exceptional athlete of mysterious or lowly origin , prone to
joining races from the crowd long after the starting gun but still managing to come in first. There was the garage hand Alf Tupper and there was
Wilson the Wonder Athlete , rumoured to be well over a hundred years old , whose focus and intense regime provide a template for today’s live-forever
fitness fanatics. His diet comprised nuts and berries and , as with Stalin , there was no recorded instance of him ever telling a joke.
Enlightenment philosophers used the word sensation to describe direct perception , the opposite of reflection. Young folk have little
time for reflection within their cyberspace days but they are so , like , partial to sensation in their pleasures. Those entrepreneurs who
recognised the allure of outdoor sensation as a consumer commodity promoted sky-diving , bungee-jumps , Via Ferrata trips , jet-boat rides
and white-water rafting. These were activities with all the connotations of self-importance and excitement favoured by unreflective youth .... and
they were worth paying good money for. They went into every young executive’s portfolio for next year’s summer holidays , when their shorts and
Motorhead T-shirts would be first into the suitcase. Refracted through the wordly lens of the Market , that unruly spirit also provides a suite of
images for Advertising’s Rebel-Sell. In that muddled fantasy , long-haired young groovers are free-falling and paragliding , surfing and skateboard-
somersaulting to the accompaniment of a rocking soundtrack. Lone heroes of unorthodoxy promoting products as adventurous as double glazing or home
insurance , whilst 'going their own way' into sunsets over peaks or ocean ; brothers to the eagle and the dolphin , sisters of the sun and stars.
In their shorts.
Wig
(1)
Characters in a series of books of short stories written by English author
Richmal Crompton. The books are set in the 1920s and are all based around the mischievous suburban schoolboy William Brown and his band of friends , known
as The Outlaws.
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Archive
Virtual rambler #1 – Posturing, 9th March 2010
Virtual rambler #2 – Managerialism, 17th March 2010
Virtual rambler #3 – Nostalgia, 27th March 2010
Virtual rambler #4 – The Alpha Male, 13th April 2010
Virtual rambler #5 – General Elections, 3rd May 2010
Virtual rambler #6 – The Leisure Industry, 15th May 2010
Virtual rambler #7 – Guide to The World Cup, 15th June 2010
Virtual rambler #8 – Human Nature, 12th July 2010
Virtual rambler #9 – Communities, 13th August 2010
Virtual rambler #10 – Worlds Apart, 6th October 2010
Virtual rambler #11 – Dawdling, 22nd November 2010
Virtual rambler #12 – ELVIS, 24th December 2010
Virtual rambler #13 – Transience, 4th February 2011
Virtual rambler #14 – Regional Accents, 15th April 2011
Virtual rambler #15 – The Afterlife, 21st July 2011
Virtual rambler #16 – Bizspeak, 27th August 2011
Virtual rambler #17 – Night Walks, 3rd October 2011
Virtual rambler #18 – Bob Dylan & Charles Dickens, 8th November 2011
Virtual rambler #19 – Another Nutty Professor, 16th December 2011
Virtual rambler #20 – Customer Choice, 16th January 2012
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