11:28am Friday 26th June 2009
By David Barnett
Over the years, especially back in the pre-recessionary days when anyone could suck at the teat of easy, cheap credit and – or so it felt like – get stuff without feeling you were paying for it, I went to some pretty hot places. India, Singapore, Malaysia, Greece, Spain, the South of France.
I don’t tell you this to in any way brag, but to offer you an observation. During my travels, you see, I don’t recall seeing many of the indigenous peoples walking around the streets of their homes bare-chested.
What then, I wonder, prompts the males of the species here in the UK to strip off their T-shirts at the slightest threat of a bit of sunshine?
Yeah, I’m talking to you. The one with the wiry, heroin-chic frame that you’re obviously proud of. The one with your T-shirt folded up and tucked into the waistband of your trackie bottoms while you walk around the streets of Bradford with your mates.
Frankly, you look like a complete and utter spanner. You look as if you might not be all there in the head. As if you’re a bit touched, and think it’s all right to wander the streets half-naked.
Worse than that, you actually smell. You smell of stale sweat or – and sometimes this is even worse – cheap deodorant. I’ve been in shops in the city centre and you’ve come swaggering in, thinking you own the place. With your chest bare. Like a spanner.
Perhaps you do this because you think you are irresistible to the opposite sex, you with your smelly armpits and your thin little chest and your ribs poking through. Maybe you think that if you walk the streets of Bradford half-dressed, some woman will be so overcome by your bare naked chest that she will leap on you, as though life was actually like a Lynx advert and you weren’t, in actual fact, a half-naked spanner.
Or... or maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe there’s some pleasure you get from walking around in a little gang with your mates, all of you with your shirts off. I believe the polite, on-trend phrase for it at the moment is “bromance”.
Maybe your culture and upbringing frowns upon you having a relationship with someone of the same gender. But by taking your shirts off, all lads together, you can disguise your homo-erotic feelings for your pal as simple cameraderie. Don’t be ashamed. This is the 21st century, you know. People will understand.
Or maybe it’s just that you’re a spanner (I did want to use another word, something a little more anatomical, but it wouldn’t be appropriate in a family newspaper. Spanner does the job, I think).
Whatever your reason, think twice before peeling that shirt off and subjecting the rest of us who are walking around Bradford in some semblance of respectable dress to the close proximity of your naked flesh. Just say no.
Next week: If you’re really going to wear sandals, can you please at least wash your feet?
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