Suit you, sir?

Hi everybody. Apologies for the decline in blogging in case you miss my regular posts (tip: seek help). This is the busiest time of the year: essays and dissertations to mark. Hundreds of them. Good bad and spectacularly weird. This year, because we have a management team that hasn't been near a classroom in several decades, other urgent tasks have been added. With under a week's notice, we've been asked to propose PhD studentships (with a guaranteed job afterwards) and research projects to qualify for workload buyouts. So that's more forms, drafting, circulating, putting together supervisory teams, redrafting etc. ad infinitum. Even when they hit on a good idea, this place manages to screw it up by imposing arbitrary and ill-timed deadlines.

Even more inconveniently – especially to the deceased – I had a funeral to attend today. Jean was a stalwart of the nursing profession, one of those nurses who not only saved the lives of those for whom she cared, but brightened the lives of everybody she met, despite having a considerable amount of heartbreak thanks to losing her son David when he was only 28. The church was packed beyond capacity and the familiar cliché about celebrating a life rather than mourning a loss was for once entirely true. After five years of cancer's ravages, peace was what she wanted.

So here I am in the office at 7.30 in the evening, wearing my best suit and ready to mark some Shakespeare essays. Perhaps the professional garb will up my game. Despite the kind words of a French Philosophy colleague I bumped into, I am a living reproach to the tailor's art. However expensive and lovely the clothes (today I'm wearing Church Oxfords and an Aquascutum black 3-button suit with a Turnbull and Asser shirt), I always look like I acquired my wardrobe by robbing a clothes bank. In the dark.

Tomorrow I'll be wearing my regulation DMs, cords, v-neck jumper as though Belle and Sebastian never went away. I used to laugh at my boss, who told me he decided at 16 that he'd wear the same clothes for the rest of his life rather than worry about it (shirt, tie, jersey, blue blazer) and stuck to it. I've accidentally done the same thing - virtually everything I wear in public can be seen in the publicity shots for Blur's seminal Modern Life is Rubbish. (Though I don't agree that modern life is rubbish, by the way).

Clothes are difficult: teaching means being exposing yourself to the judgement of hundreds of people for whom clothes are important, whether it's students or the other Governors (and it's much harder for women, who are wrongly judged on appearance even more). I don't want to dress like them. I don't want to distance myself with a suit. It's important, I think, to convey to them that what we're interested in is the life of the mind rather than appearances. I tend to aim for utter anonymity. No extremes of style, nothing figure-hugging, muted colours, no artificial materials and no labels (I would make an exception for old band shirts but none of them fit anymore). If I find a good article with a label, I'll unpick it. If in doubt, I think of my colleague who turns up in patchwork clown trousers: nobody cares because he's a genius. My old philosophy tutor took a different approach: brown shoes, brown socks, brown suit, brown jersey, brown shirt, brown tie and brown hair. Accesorised with a brown Gladstone bag. Fully committed to brown, that man.

However… the older and fatter I get, the more I wish I could afford the kind of tailoring that conceals the more grotesque aspects of my ravaged carcass. I have one of my dad's suits from the early 70s. I don't know how much he was paid, but it's a work of art. Dark grey wool three piece, felted lapels, working cuff buttons, horn buttons, ticket pocket, tailor-made for him in Dublin. When I reached the same age he was when he had it made, it fitted like it was made for me. These days I couldn't get my fat fingers into the arm-holes (whereas he's lost so much weight he probably could wear it again) and there's no way on earth that I could afford a bespoke suit of the same quality. I did once get a tailored suit from one of those companies that measures people up in hotel rooms (this is not a euphemism). Though I paid extra for pure wool, I definitely didn't get it, and despite it being bespoke, it looks like I borrowed it from someone of entirely different proportions, and always did.

Ho hum. Back to the marking.

Clothes maketh the academic?

OK, I'm sitting in this meeting and looking at what everybody's wearing. The women tend to be dressed pretty neatly or in suits. The male managers are wearing suits and ties. The male teaching staff range from denims and leather to open-necked shirts with tank tips and everything inbetween. Yesterday I was wearing a grandad shirt with a v-neck pullover, but today I'm in my Wales Fencing hoody and grey trousers.

Many academics revel in the freedom to not wear suits - I do too: the idea of strangling myself with a tie every day is very unappealing. The feeling is that we're employed and respected for our minds rather than our dress sense. There's also a very proper rebellion against the concept of 'power dressing': the academic exchange between student and lecturer shouldn't be about hierarchical power but about ideas

On the other hand, there's an argument that more formal clothes instil a degree of mental rigour, and that students respect well-dressed people because that's the way they're conditioned.

I'm torn on this one. I like suits, and the older and fatter I get, the more I appreciate the way a decent suit (especially one with elbow patches) hides all a man's pudgier bits. That said, my job basically consists of sitting down and typing or standing up and talking, none of which require specialist clothing. At conferences, I make a partial effort to be a bit neater, but not hugely. Some people wear their best suits, while others go halfway: a tweed jacket with a t-shirt, perhaps. Brian Cox, I feel, has a lot to answer for.

It's definitely an issue of identity politics. There are a lot of people who dress very carefully to give the impression that clothes don't matter, that they aren't drones in the corporate sector, whereas other colleagues dress to impress, even if it's not clear who exactly should be impressed. It may also be a matter of age and hierarchy: I'm not nervous about my colleagues or superiors' judgements any more, so I've relaxed a bit. When I went to a conference in Arkansas, even the academics' SUVs bore gun racks and Confederate flags: I'm not sure I'm ready for the cowboy-psycho look.

What do you think? What should the young(ish) academic-about-town be sporting this year? Bear in mind that even in the suit I had made specifically for me, I look like I've robbed an alien for his clobber. Perhaps we should all go back to gowns. One of my professors wore an academic gown and bow tie (with a full set of clothes, I should add) and it just looked like a man dressing up as an academic.

Zoot Horn, by the way, adheres to a classic 'mature rock god' look.

Possible looks:

Incompetent Jim Dixon from the film of Amis's Lucky Jim

Suspiciously posed

Alistair Sim as Professor Potter from The School for Scoundrels (1960 version highly recommended: 2006 remake is an excrescence)

Professor Brian Cox, ex-pop star, TV personage, physicist when time allows

Wear your heart on your sleeve

As those of you who know me personally will attest, I'm a little limited in the sartorial style stakes. Whether I'm teaching or playing, I wear basically the same clothes.

Not any more. I've found a very cool t-shirt vendor, Out of Print: taking beautiful book designs, and donating a book to African children for every purchase via this charity. So I've kitted myself out with some class, and bought books for somebody else! If we must have capitalism, this is the way to do it.

Do the same.

I bought these: Walden because it's the book that changed my life, and the Henry Miller because the design is, to me, a perfect summary of the joys of modernism.

The Black Country high life

Yesterday evening was one of the most expensive few hours of my life. This ball had better be good, now I've invested in a serious (and rather beautiful) dinner suit and all the accoutrements.

Suits are great. I don't often wear one, though I own several. They hide all imperfections.
Well, not quite all. One of my suits was tailor-made for me. Even that one, when I wear it, looks like it was borrowed from somebody slimmer, taller and more handsome. In a suit, I'm still a short, portly product of millennia of hauling pigs over Irish bogs, but it adds a little self-confidence.

The expensive evening didn't end there: Emma was cruel enough to point out that the (long-awaited and much unmourned) bankruptcy of Borders Books heralded a large sale. So off we trotted, she to buy sparkly pink things, allegedly for young relations, I to amass a stack of literary theory, science fiction and maps, lovely, lovely maps. After the shock of getting to the till, all we could do was hotfoot it to Café Rouge (the independent French bistro nearby was full) and stuff our faces, washed down with a fine Fleurie.

I could get used to this life actually. Must find a rich girl. One lacking in discrimination and self-esteem, obviously. I was so exhausted this morning that I skipped my swim, so I'll have to go tomorrow and Friday. Ugh.

Why Stoke should be razed to the ground (part 43)

This is disgusting. At least, I think it is.

As I departed Stoke-on-Trent yesterday, I passed a family outing. Standing next to his mother was a boy of about 14.

On his t-shirt was the revolting legend 'I eat pussy like a fat man eats cake', adorned with a picture of a slice of cake.

This led me to ponder the parental choices made. Is this somehow OK now? Am I really deeply conservative and the world has moved on? How is this possibly acceptable as children's clothing?

I'm guessing that a fat man eats cake with little care for enjoyment or other people's pleasure, so in fact the slogan's quite threatening. It links consensual activity with selfish consumption, and uses a particularly revolting term to boot.

Worse than that, it was clearly untrue. This boy was large. Very large. It should have read 'I eat cake like an sex-addict eats pussy'.

Nobody in Norway wore slogan t-shirts.

Sartorial crisis

Here's a little task for you.

I looked at my clothes yesterday, and realised that I'm in a bind. Most of my clothes would suit an accountant in his forties, apart from a smattering of t-shirts which announce my love of various obscure defunct bands, or fencing competitions I've competed in or refereed. I need casual clothes, avoiding both Alan Partridge and the billboard look, appropriate to a 34-year old lecturer about town.

I went out in search of clothing yesterday and came back angry and empty-handed. The shirts I have with text on them usually relate to an activity or group with which I have some connection. What happened to our culture? All the shops aren't just selling clothes festooned with the maker's names: most of them 'advertise' imaginary products or companies, as though being a walking billboard is the absolute pinnacle of style. I remove identifying marks from clothes - why on earth is it cool to proclaim labels, real or fictional?

So tell me - where the hell can I find some relaxed t-shirts lacking such things? Abstract designs, if muted, are fine.