Why Do I Say These Things?

by Jonathan Ross

  Day one was fine – we both wore jeans and cowboy boots and cowboy shirts and hats. We thought we were being slightly ironic and cute – everyone else just thought we were from Austin or Dallas or somewhere else in the middle of America. Day two, I pushed the boat out. I wore my finest new purchases from London. Black, voluminous yet somehow also revealing linen shorts, a stripy shirt and – the masterstroke! – black crocodile-skin chisel-toed slingback sandals. I had known they were for meant for me, and me alone, the moment I laid eyes on them in the swanky shoe shop in Chelsea owned by master cobbler Patrick Cox. They were magnificent. Magnificent and insane. Magnificent, insane and rather uncomfortable, prone to chafing around the heel, which resulted in some very painful blisters.

  Before you ask, I am not, nor ever have been, a cross-dresser; I’m not remotely interested in women’s clothing unless it is being worn by women themselves. Or has just been removed, or tragically is just about to go back on. Women are a vital part of the equation if I am to appreciate stilettos or blouses or puff-ball skirts. I have no desire to see them on me or any other gentleman. So my excitement at finding chisel-toed slingbacks for men was not because I thought I had found a crafty way of buying women’s shoes for myself – I just loved the theatrical silliness of them.

  So I bought them and had been waiting for the perfect opportunity to parade about in them, and for some reason thought that a day out at a theme park in the sweltering heat of the California summer was the ideal moment. I was wrong. Even sophisticated, educated people might have looked askance at someone dressed as I was that day. But many of these people were from remote parts of America, and they hadn’t enjoyed the liberating side-effects of punk and post-punk attitudes. They still thought it was OK to call people names based on what they imagined their sexual preferences might be – preferences they did not approve of. Some merely tried to look as disgusted as possible and drew their children towards them, and away from me. If I had been a predatory paedophile, as my shoes seemed to be signalling to the majority of those in Disneyland that day, would I really have taken so much time and trouble dressing up to look the part? That’s what they might have asked themselves if they hadn’t been so busy looking around for things to throw at me. If I had been hoping to abduct their sons or daughters, surely I would not have chosen to do so in shoes that I could barely stand up in, much less walk or run in, after just half an hour queuing for Peter Pan (still one of my favourites, by the way). I still have those shoes somewhere, and I hope one day to catch up with Patrick Cox and ask him exactly what he was thinking when he came up with that particular design.

  By the age of thirteen, I had shot up to six foot one without filling out in any way – I probably still weighed no more than three, perhaps four stone. As I have described elsewhere, I was also painfully shortsighted, and my hair was still cut by Mum, which, it has to be said, wasn’t purely an attempt to economize, although with six kids that must have been a big factor. No, the main reason Mum bravely decided to pick up the scissors and give it a go was that the only hairdressing salon near us – or barber’s, as this was in the days when hairdressing salons were the province of women – was a place on the corner next to the junk shop in Leytonstone High Road, owned and run by an elderly Maltese gentleman, a master craftsman who had perfected two styles: really short and horrible or slightly longer and horrible. Eventually he did allow some younger blood, possibly his sons, to come into the business, and they promptly jazzed the place up with adverts for Durex and replaced the pictures of James Mason and Rock Hudson in the window with those of David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser, then riding high in the popularity stakes as Starsky and Hutch. What red-blooded young man didn’t want hair and a cardigan like Paul Michael Glaser? None I knew, that’s for sure. But by then we’d got used to the passable and free job Mum would inflict on us. Her home cuts looked fine when they were freshly done, but as soon as you washed your hair or slept on it, suddenly it no longer resembled the lovingly shaped halo she’d tried to create, and small bits would stick up and out all over the place, and no amount of patting or slicking down with tap water could make them stay down.

  Already you will have formed a fairly accurate picture of my younger self. But now let’s put clothes on the mannequin, and let’s dress him in cast-offs. To be fair, the stuff available for boys and young men in 1960s Britain, whether new or second-hand, was utilitarian at best. Children’s clothes were not miniature versions of adult fashions as they are now. There was nothing flamboyant or fancy.

  My mum did her best: she has a photograph somewhere of my two older brothers and me looking very dapper in outfits she was clearly very proud of. She’d managed to get them from a shop somewhere in north London that imported children’s clothes from Italy, where kids were dressed with a little more panache. But in Britain, children spent most of their time in either grey or brown until the 1970s, when we were allowed colour for the first time. I suspect that it’s no coincidence that kids started dressing a little more brightly at about the time that colour televisions came on the scene and shamed parents into upping their game a bit. My junior school uniform was a dark-grey blazer and trousers with a white shirt, which inevitably turned grey after a number of washes. Jumpers were grey or brown, or, for really dressy occasions, brown with a grey pattern or vice versa.

  Even when I moved up to secondary school, which wasn’t quite as strictly uniform-based, more or less everything I wore to school was essentially mud coloured. I had a pair of flared herringbone trousers, which you might think would have rather appealed to me, and indeed, for quite some time, while they belonged to my elder brother Paul, I did look forward to owning them. My mum and dad had originally bought a pair for each of my older brothers – both brown, of course – when flares were the latest thing, but not for me. Maybe they couldn’t find them in my size or couldn’t afford another pair, or maybe I was too young for grown-up long trousers at the time. Whatever the reason, I eventually inherited Paul’s, which would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the fact that by the time he’d finished with them I’d had a growth spurt and was about four inches taller than he was. So they were hand-me-downs from an older, shorter brother to a younger, taller brother. Maybe that should be hand-me-ups. Either way, they flapped around several inches of exposed ankle.

  I suspect they had been bought from a catalogue. In the days before everyone had credit cards, catalogue shopping was a popular way of acquiring stuff you needed or wanted immediately but couldn’t afford to shell out for in one hit, because you just paid off a little bit each month. My parents were regular catalogue buyers, and for a brief spell when I was about twelve or thirteen, they even had a shop selling on catalogue goods that customers had sent back.

  I’ve no idea how Mum and Dad made this discovery, but they found out that the catalogue companies couldn’t resell any returns as new, even though there was nothing wrong with them beyond the fact that they didn’t fit or the customer just didn’t like them, and so all this stuff went to big depots where it was sold off at knockdown prices to other retailers or anyone else who had the necessary credentials or whatever magic wand was required to gain entry. It gave my parents the idea for their shop. With access to the depots, they could buy good-quality stock, for which they knew there was a healthy market, very cheaply, sell it on cheaply and still make a modest profit.

  It was a very exciting project, and when I think about it now, I admire my parents hugely for making a go of it. As far as I know, they had no experience of retail or wholesale – or any aspect of the selling or reselling business, come to that – but they set it all up themselves, finding premises in nearby Leyton, equipping the shop and investing their own money in it, and it was pretty successful.

  I think my mum, in particular, very much enjoyed the adventure. With all six kids growing up and beginning to do their own thing, she liked having an interest of her own outside the house and family. She was the driving force behind the look of the place. She went for a 1920s am
bience (in the early 1970s, when the fashion store Biba was reaching its zenith, art-deco-influenced interior design and anything involving cloche hats or flappers was highly trendy) and came up with the name Anything Goes, which, instantly evoking as it did the Cole Porter song of the same name, cleverly encapsulated both what was for sale there and the period feel she was aiming for. Although they got a local sign-writer to paint the name in art-deco-ish lettering above the front door, the reality was that it was a rather grotty little shop on a rather grimy road in east London.

  I remember it being fairly busy, especially when it first opened. Locals thought it was great to be able to get clothes and shoes at such reasonable prices, and all brand-new, not seconds: it was only that the packaging had been opened and the stuff had been tried on. We kids would go over to help Mum out and I spent several afternoons on my own in the shop, which was always fun. Not that you got up to much or anything out of the ordinary happened, but it was surprisingly exciting to feel that you were part of something, on the ownership side of the fence. To be there when Mum or Dad opened the door first thing in the morning or closed it at night gave me a real thrill. It made me feel special somehow, made me think our family were special, and even though the success of the place was rather short-lived as the quality of the stuff they could buy gradually deteriorated, for the first six months or so I couldn’t have been more proud if they had turned around and told me we owned Harrods.

  Of course, the returned-goods depots were also a valuable source of kit for us which my parents wouldn’t otherwise have been able to afford. I have a vivid memory of my mum and dad coming back one day after stocking up with various toys and other bits and pieces, among which I discovered an Evel Knievel stunt-rider set. This was something I’d had my heart set on for ages and I was over the moon. It was one of the must-have toys of the moment, which in my circle at school usually meant we would all talk about it for months without ever actually seeing one up close, then move on to the next object of desire and fascination, which, chances were, we’d also not get to experience until we turned forty and eBay entered our lives. I asked if I could play with it and my dad said yes. I took this to mean that I could have it, so I removed it from its packaging, stuck the decals that accompanied it on to the motorbike and the ramp it would fly over, and put that little mother through its paces. By the time my dad came in to see what all the noise was about there can’t have been a patch of wall or an inch of soft furnishing that bike hadn’t skidded over or crashed into. He pointed out that by ‘play with it’ he had meant just that. I shouldn’t have put the stickers on and I shouldn’t have knocked seven bells out of it.

  I was more than a little deflated. Deep down I’d known it was for the shop, not me, though it’s rather sweet that my dad hadn’t objected to me opening it up to have a go with it. But it was with a heavy heart that I peeled the stickers off and tried to get them to stick back on the decal sheet they had come from. And it was a sad little Jonathan that packed Mr Knievel back into his cardboard bed to go off and be loved, and hurled into windows and over television sets, by someone else’s little boy.

  Actually, if I’m being honest, I’d have to admit the chances are I ended up keeping that toy, but I like to imagine that I had to give it back, since this is one of the few incidents I can offer as evidence of my heartbreaking formative years in the vain hope of appealing to those of you who enjoy a good misery memoir.

  It was mainly clothes that came to us via the catalogue trade, though, and it was rarely stuff we would have actually chosen. Being such an odd-shaped child – I grew into a fairly odd-shaped adult, come to think of it – clothes could not always be found that fitted me properly. Ankles and wrists were normally a little more exposed than was the fashion, and few things I wore ever really looked as though they were intended for me, if you know what I mean. Then there were my feet. They were enormous: size eleven. Now that I’m a powerful and heavy six foot one and a half, they don’t seem wildly out of proportion to the rest of me; in fact, I’m quite pleased with them. They’re a decent size, not monstrously big and not effeminately small. They give my legs a nice finish and I can wear flares or drainpipes and they look fine at the end there.

  But having a pair of size elevens from about the age of ten when you’re not yet your full height is no joke, and I was incredibly self-conscious about them. I felt as though all eyes were constantly drawn to my feet. Every time I stepped out of the front door, I imagined people were looking over, seeing a perfectly normal person and then doing a double-take when they spotted these gargantuan plates of meat sticking out of the bottom of my trousers.

  My parents were vaguely aware of my discomfort, I’m sure, but it didn’t trouble them as much as it troubled me – quite rightly, because it wasn’t as if there was anything actually wrong with my feet. One day my mum and dad came back from one of their supply runs and announced they’d got new training shoes for all of us boys, which caused great excitement. This was before training shoes became the footwear of choice for all young men, and they were still something of a novelty. The idea of wearing what were supposed to be games shoes all the time seemed pretty radical.

  Personally, I was never a huge fan of the training shoe, from a sartorial point of view, until I recently discovered an eccentric range made by a Japanese company called A Bathing Ape, on which subject I may digress for a moment, because I’m very fond of my Bathing Apes. I have quite a large collection of them, in fact. According to the creator of the brand, the designer Nigo, the name combines a homage to the movie The Planet of the Apes with a reference to a Japanese saying about apes bathing in lukewarm water, used to imply that the younger generation is spoilt, pampered, complacent and happy to just copy each other. I think. Anyway, the Bathing Ape trainer is the equivalent of the customized car. Like pimped Nikes, they boast an array of unusual colours, big stars on the side and go-faster stripes. And yes, I know it’s hideously inappropriate for a man approaching fifty a) to be concerned about what kind of training shoes he’s wearing and b) to opt for the flashiest, most obscure brand he can find, but there you go, that’s me in a nutshell.

  I think my Bathing Ape habit goes back to this first pair of trainers I had that were designed for daywear. Just as the homosexual community has adopted the once cruel slur ‘queer’ and used it to empower themselves, and just as African American rappers have stolen ‘nigger’ from the mouths of racists to hurl it back as a badge of honour, so in some small way does my adoption of the brashest trainers on the block as my day shoes of choice redress the shame and pain caused by the events I am about to relate – or am I making way too much of this?.

  Anyhow, my brothers and I opened these boxes enthusiastically. We all had trainers in different colours and, though I can’t recall now what my brothers’ were like, I do remember that theirs were fairly normal and nice. Mine, as well as being, for obvious reasons, the largest of the lot, were also the most revolting bright orange. A luminous, glow-in-the-dark orange. So orange you could barely looks at them without sunglasses. They were almost identical, not just in colour but also in texture, to Cheesy Wotsits. You know, those snacks covered in an artificial cheese flavouring that look radioactive; horribly tasty things that you should never start unless you’re prepared to finish the whole bag – and to have slightly furry, cheese-smelling orange fingers for several hours afterwards.

  So imagine, if you will, this kid in trousers ending a couple of inches above the ankle, teamed with giant orange shoes. That was me. I looked like a clown. Flares, drainpipes, nothing worked with them – well, can you think of anything that goes with Day-Glo trainers? No, I thought not. Unless you needed to leave the house dressed from head to toe in high-visibility orange to avoid being knocked over, there was no earthly reason to put these things on your feet.

  At school, a kind-hearted teacher who meant no harm took me to one side and asked me what was wrong with my feet. He thought that my trainers were some sort of corrective footwear, and perhaps he wa
s right. Who knows? With hindsight, I’d have been wiser going barefoot. At that age you try to see yourself as a kind of James Bond in the making, picturing in your mind’s eye how you might stroll elegantly into a room or a bar in some foreign hotel, and everyone will stop and admire the charismatic, immaculately dressed, sexy stranger that is you. As it was, whenever I entered a room people would glance up, then down at my impossible-to-ignore footwear, and either fall backwards from the glare or just laugh uncontrollably.

  I wore those Cheesy Wotsit trainers for about a year and a half. I lived in fear of somebody coming up to me on my walk to school in the mornings and offering me a job with a travelling circus. It was perhaps at this time that I developed the break-neck walking pace that I employ today, much to the chagrin of my wife and kids, who are normally to be found a hundred yards behind, red faced, trying to keep up. But it’s not you I’m striding away from, lovely family. It’s the past. It’s those shoes.

  Faster, slimmer, bendier. Working towards a better me

  Are you a self-improving kind of person? Don’t panic, I’m not judging you, and I’m fully aware that there’s no right answer to this question. You say yes and it makes you sound a little desperate, maybe a self-loather, if there is such a term. You say no and you sound lazy and a little smug – what could there possibly be to improve about you? But I struggle with it, because over the years that have whizzed by since I left full-time education I’ve become increasingly aware of just how stupid and ill-informed I really am, and how little I exploit my full potential.

  Of course, I may just be deluding myself – maybe this is as good as it gets. Maybe I am destined to spend the rest of my time on this planet never speaking another language fluently, never drawing gasps of admiration from both men and women and maybe even dogs as I strip down to my Speedos on the beach. Perhaps I should just accept my embarrassing lack of knowledge of world events and my inability to tell you the name of more than one current African leader (and a bad one at that), and resign myself to having no real idea why the Bank of England keeps putting up interest rates then lowering them again. Perhaps this ignorance is just the way it’s meant to be, and I should simply settle into the role of happy-go-lucky idiot and enjoy my time.