o to be cool

It's painful, sometimes, to see young men walking around. There is no creature in creation more self-conscious than a teenage male. You go through a phase where it's just impossible to go anywhere or do anything without worrying about every aspect. It's as if, age 14, you're given prosthetic limbs and have to learn to use them all over again. Couple this with concerns about hair and skin, the words you use, and the clothes you walk around in, and you get a mess of insecurities, which manifests itself in a need to project coolness.

Like a novice actor, you worry about what to with your hands. Pockets? Around waist height? At front or at sides? You worry about your stride, your steps, your style of walking. You become concerned with buttons on jackets, if you wear a jacket, the width and height-above-ground of your trouser bottoms, and so on.

Of course, a massive industry grows up around all this insecurity, and you can opt to become a fashion vict, or go your own way and become the other kind, the kind that adopts 1969 bombed out rock-star chic, or 1977 bondage trousers. Tattoos, piercings, headbands, bandanas, caps... anything to give the impression that you know what you're doing. But they're all just ways, aren't they, of being a fashion victim all over again?

I knew a guy once, so concered with being cool, he took to walking everywhere solipsistically enclosed in his Walkperson headphones, hands in pockets, eyes to the ground. He was mugged by two other guys, one of whom just took his legs from under him, and he went down like the proverbial sack of spuds, hands still in pockets, face to the ground. How cool is that?

Then, I don't know at what age, you wake up one day and you don't care anymore. Maybe it's because you're in a relationship, or because you now have kids of your own and more important things to worry about. But the anorak you refused to wear as a teenager, because you thought you would rather die, you now slip it on to pop round to the local shop. You stop looking into the mirror quite as often; or, if you are me, you stop looking into mirrors at all. You stop spending a fortune on hair products, and, like Homer Simpson, you stick toilet paper on your face when you cut yourself shaving. And forget it's there.

I still suffer pangs of whatever it was came over me as a teenager. Between the ages of 18 and around 21, I wore nothing but Green Flash tennis shoes. Not because I liked them, but because I just didn't like any of the shoes in any of the shoe shops. And I still feel the same way. There are two kinds of shoes I buy, and if they don't have them, I don't buy them at all. So I have to wait for whatever cycles the shoe industry goes through before I can get new shoes. Because, obviously, I still care for some reason. It's not about fashion or coolness, though; it's about comfort, and the knowledge that comes with experience, the knowledge that all the other shoes are going to hurt my feet.

I have to admit, in fact, that I've probably gone to the opposite extreme. I don't like much of anything in the shops. I utterly refuse to wear anything with a name or logo on it. Plain colours only, please, and I endeavour at all times to dress generically. When I go shopping with my wife, there are whole swathes of shops I refuse to enter. I just won't wear it, like Mr Knox says, I can't say it, I won't do it. I'm a High Street Refusenik. I just took a shirt to the charity shop I got last xmas: still in its plastic wrapping. It had a pattern on it, you see. It's an almost-Amish approach, mine. Plain fabrics (and almost exclusively plain cotton) that nobody will notice.