The Virtual Rambler

Number twenty one: 18^th February 2012

Wearing Shorts

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.

Archive

Virtual rambler #1 – Posturing, 9^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #2 – Managerialism, 17^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #3 – Nostalgia, 27^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #4 – The Alpha Male, 13^th April 2010
Virtual rambler #5 – General Elections, 3^rd May 2010
Virtual rambler #6 – The Leisure Industry, 15^th May 2010
Virtual rambler #7 – Guide to The World Cup, 15^th June 2010
Virtual rambler #8 – Human Nature, 12^th July 2010
Virtual rambler #9 – Communities, 13^th August 2010
Virtual rambler #10 – Worlds Apart, 6^th October 2010
Virtual rambler #11 – Dawdling, 22^nd November 2010
Virtual rambler #12 – ELVIS, 24^th December 2010
Virtual rambler #13 – Transience, 4^th February 2011
Virtual rambler #14 – Regional Accents, 15^th April 2011
Virtual rambler #15 – The Afterlife, 21^st July 2011
Virtual rambler #16 – Bizspeak, 27^th August 2011
Virtual rambler #17 – Night Walks, 3^rd October 2011
Virtual rambler #18 – Bob Dylan and Charles Dickens, 8^th November 2011
Virtual rambler #19 – Another Nutty Professor, 16^th December 2011
Virtual rambler #20 – Customer Choice, 16^th January 2012
Virtual rambler #21 – Wearing Shorts, 18^th February 2012
Virtual rambler #22 – A Brief History of Progress, 17^th March 2012
Virtual rambler #23 – The Myth of Sisyphus, 16^th April 2012
Virtual rambler #24 – Natural History, 20^th May 2012
Virtual rambler #25 – European Self Importance, 26^th June 2012
Virtual rambler #26 – Sweet Dreams, 25^th July 2012
Virtual rambler #27 – Excess, 17^th August 2012
Virtual rambler #28 – In Denial, 20^th September 2012
Virtual rambler #29 – The Way, 21^st October 2012
Virtual rambler #30 – On Rambling, 14^th November 2012
Virtual rambler #31 – Gazing Into The Abyss, 18^th December 2012
Virtual rambler #32 – Intellectual Gloom, 25^th January 2013
Virtual rambler #33 – Great Human Achievements, 20^th February 2013
Virtual rambler #34 – Autobiography, 20^th March 2013
Virtual rambler #35 – Your Good Health, 21^st April 2013
Virtual rambler #36 – Deconstruction, 20^th May 2013
Virtual rambler #37 – My Home Town, 19^th June 2013
Virtual rambler #38 – Ancient History, 21^st July 2013
Virtual rambler #39 – Possessions, 20^th August 2013
Virtual rambler #40 – Sporting Stoics, 20^th September 2013
Virtual rambler #41 – Free Time, 20^th October 2013
Virtual rambler #42 – Ewan Don't Allow, 20^th November 2013
Virtual rambler #43 – A Literary Nexus, 20^th December 2013
Virtual rambler #44 – Taking Liberties, 16^th January 2014
Virtual rambler #45 – More or Less, 20^th February 2014
Virtual rambler #46 – Under Control, 20^th March 2014
Virtual rambler #47 – Waiting, 20^th April 2014
Virtual rambler #48 – They Rose Without Trace, 20^th May 2014
Virtual rambler #49 – Bigger Impression , Smaller Footprint, 20^th June 2014
Virtual rambler #50 – Terpsichorean Instrumentations, 18^th July 2014
Virtual rambler #51 – Socially Mediated, 19^th August 2014
Virtual rambler #52 – Rambling Into The Sunset, 20^th September 2014