Do you think I should take a coat?

It's an old photo. December 2007

I left the bathroom wearing just a t-shirt. Well, jeans and shoes and stuff too. My intention was to put on the hoodie that was hanging on the kitchen door but, as so often nowadays, I was distracted by something else and I forgot. It wasn't till I began to feel chilly that I remembered my original plan. 

My overcoat was also hanging from the same hook as the hoodie. Time for that to go into storage I thought. The overcoat, a long dark overcoat, is probably my favourite coat. It came with me from England. It was two or three years old when we got here so it must be closing in on 20 years old now. The lining's a mess and if you look at it closely it's got that sheen on some of the seams to bear witness to its longevity. March is the month when the weather starts to take a turn for the better here in Alicante. 

The t-shirt incident and the coat reminded me of a story I'd read, as a youth, about a civil servant and an overcoat - Dostoyevsky perhaps, or Kafka? Google says it was Gogol. The story tells of a minor civil servant whose life becomes dominated by saving for a new warm coat. As soon as he has it the coat is stolen from him by a couple of ruffians. The police will do nothing and he dies of a fever brought on by his coatlessness. If Gogol could write a short story about an overcoat I could blog about one!

In the North of Spain people need cold weather clothes just like they need central heating and insulation. Here, in Alicante, when people wear a scarf it's really only because they want to wear a scarf. It's just conceivable that on a couple of days each year a scarf may actually be necessary, gloves even, but, basically, proper cold weather gear isn't really called for in Alicante. It's not that we don't have winter or anything. As I have remarked tens of times it is perishing inside in winter but outside, when it's not nice, the best description, often, would be something like chilly. As we've closed in on Spring my denim jacket has come into its own and, before that, a sort of thick cardigan I have has done sterling work through the traditional winter months. Sports jackets are good too, a bit of a barrier against the cold but without too much weight. With a pullover and sports jacket I'm set up for most Winter Alicante weather except rain. 

This year I may have worn the overcoat ten times. When I wear my overcoat people don't notice the sheen, they don't laugh at it, they notice that it's big and dark and coatlike. When I wear the coat Spanish people often comment to me on the coldness of the weather. The wearing of a long overcoat is certain proof that it's cold. 

If March is when the weather cheers up late October and November is when we notice that things are changing for the worse. Last November I bought a jacket; one to wear outside against the cold and rain and wind. It was a bit of a whim but it was cheap and it was a nice sort of yellow colour. It's made of a vaguely waterproof sort of material so it could be a replacement for the rainy day waterproof jacket I bought in 2009 in Salamanca. The new jacket also has a bit of a lining so it is warm enough to replace the padded jacket I bought in Granada in 2016. I've tried hard to wear it, what with it being new and things, but I reckon it's been out fewer than four or five times in the four months.

The clocks change on Sunday. The sun has shone all today and I was able to cast off my pullover for several hours. Very soon that t-shirt will be fine as long as I remember to add the jeans, sandals etc.

Short change

I've given up not wearing shorts. I don't like them, I think they look stupid (especially on me) and, more than anything, they seem to require that I wear footwear which leaves my feet severely compromised. But shorts are so commonplace that I've decided to stop fighting and to wear them.

We went to a barbecue last week at a posh, modern house. It was time to go so I washed my hands and face and combed my hair. I didn't think to change my faded shorts and my rolls of flab displaying t-shirt till Maggie appeared wearing a spotty dress. "Do I have to dress up?," I groaned. I did, so I did. A shirt with a collar and leather shoes. I even shaved.

We weren't out of place but I could have got away with the shorts, well maybe. Perhaps I would have needed to iron them first. Most people, even if they were in shorts, looked neat. I cultivate crumpled and scruffy. Like those 1980s Bacardi ads but without the firm flesh.

We went to see the opening speeches of the Pinoso Fiestas on Thursday. Maggie commented that lots of the women in the audience were very smartly dressed. It was then that I realised then that I have a view on dress codes in Spain.

The only place where it seems, for everyday people, to be essential to dress up is for a wedding and probably for a communion. Women at weddings wear unusually smart clothes; red carpet stuff.  Men, on the other hand, wear badly fitting suits dragged out of a genteel semi retirement. The men look uncomfortable. Funerals are different. There seems to be no need to smarten up for a funeral and I'm often a bit taken aback by the casualness of funeral wear. In fact there seems to be no need to smarten up for work, for the theatre or for the opera. This doesn't mean that Spain is scruffy it simply means that people dress as they think appropriate. Most of the time there is no imposition of a dress code or even a particular expectation. Not always of course. I worked somewhere that had a (very light touch) dress code and I saw a restaurant website the other day that said that the dress style was "formal" though I'm sure they meant neither black nor white tie. The flip side of this is that if you go out wearing a traditional cape, a dinner jacket, a lounge suit or a scarf when it's 25ºC then nobody will give you a second glance.

I'm probably wrong. My wardrobe choice has been greatly reduced by the unfathomable shrinkage of many of my clothes over the years so I may be seeking justification for my own slovenliness. And I do still try to adapt, a little, to the situation by choosing black jeans, faded blue jeans or my Cliff Richard jeans. The last because my mum always reckoned that Cliff was so clean cut he pressed a crease into his jeans. It's true that some jeans are smarter than others.

The few times I've been to a classy restaurant in the evening I usually wear beige chinos and a short sleeved, checked, button down collar shirt. If there are other grey haired British men there they will be wearing exactly the same basic outfit. We Britons are well trained.

Armani doesn't do a blue tux

Twenty years ago, more, I was walking out of Covent Garden, probably via Floral Street, maybe King Street. It was love at first sight. In the window of Emporio Armani; a charcoal grey suit. I walked away twice but I was drawn back. The chap in the shop wasn't like the man in the Aquascutum shop a few years before who had explained to me that if I were just looking that's what the window displays were for. Mr Armani's man was welcoming and persuasive. My credit card groaned but bore the strain. I wore suits a lot then and I always felt great in the Armani. Like a dinner jacket it had a magical back straightening effect.

In fact, once upon a time, I had suits and shirts and shoes and trousers for almost any occasion from a barbecue to a wedding. Maybe a new tie for a funeral or new shoes for a naming ceremony but the basic kit was there. It's not the same now. I have jeans and T shirts and hardly anything else. I never iron. I do have several pairs of chinos and quite a selection of short sleeved shirts in the wardrobe but I can't wear them. They look alright on the hangers but, once on, the buttons on the shirts gape and the trouser waistbands dig in. Heaven knows why; a faulty washing machine maybe. They are remnants of the dress code from the place I worked in Cartagena.

We went to see the crowning of the local carnival queens in Pinoso last night. Considering that we are a town of 7,500 people the event is glitzy, polished and professional. The presentation is rehearsed and smooth, the frocks range from the elegantly understated to the fluffiest meringue. The smiles are wide, teeth flash and emotions are on plain view.

As we set off to see the coronation I changed my shorts for a far too narrow (given my age) pair of jeans, brushed my hair but kept the same t shirt on. Maggie changed into a nice bright frock. She had caught the mood better than me. In general people were pretty smartly dressed. Some people were in their finery but smart casual was the order of the day.

People do dress up in Spain, they dress up all the time, but they seem to do it more because they want to rather than because society tells them they have to. Normally, if you are going to a wedding or a baptism then you put on your finery and, in general, women seem to do it much better than men. They look relatively comfortable in their satin dresses and high heels whilst the blokes fidget with their marginally too short or slightly overtight suits and the wayward knot in their tie. The same doesn't seem to be true of funerals. The general style for funerals always strikes me as being a bit scruffy and I sometimes wonder if there is a slightly anarchic resistance to dressing up in the face of mortality; better to cock a snoop at death than to kowtow. If there is a dress code in banks and insurance offices I haven't caught the essence of it. For most professionals the appropriate style seems to be an unremarkable blouse skirt or shirt trouser combination but, nearly as often, the woman bank manager will be wearing a metaphorical pair of ripped jeans and pink pumps and nobody seems to mind or even notice. At the theatre I've seen men in Salamanca and Madrid wearing traditional cloaks side by side with men in scruffy everyday stuff. Basically, and within reason, people seem to wear what they want when they want.

So, nowadays I go everywhere and to everything in jeans and T shirts. I don't have a pair of shoes that will take a polish and however nice the salesman is I will never again spend over a thousand quid on a suit.