Why I Fear Handbags

The other day, I was lying on a bench in my garden, dipping my hobnob in my coffee, flicking crumbs to my friend the blackbird, and idly devising ways to cap the Boy Scouts behind my house with an aging air rifle and not get arrested, when the mens bit of the Sunday Supplement I was flicking through started shouting at me.

“Hermes handbag”.

Huh?

“The ultimate man-bag”.

Hang on, wai...

“Competitively priced at £160. You cannot afford be seen without this bag. Buy it now”.

After I’d read the sentence a few times, turned the magazine upside down, and tried out a few basic cipher patterns on it, I eventually concluded that it meant I should invest in what is, to all intends and purposes, a bag for women for men. It also foretold dire omens if I did not buy it this instant; people would inevitably think I was a bin-bag wearing troglodyte who fished for food in wheelie bins and shopped exclusively in Poundland. There would be no mercy for such as me.

This worries me.

First off – “You cannot be seen without this bag”. Somehow, I doubted that. I imagined myself, darting furtively from shadow to shadow, crouching in the grit-and-dust dark of a Soviet-era bloc, breath fast and tense, arched back pressed hard to the cold concrete, bagless, like the filthy fashion fugitive I apparently am. Karl Lagerfeld would be pursuing me on foot, looking like a camp Teutonic Terminator. Ozwald Boateng would be following me with dogs. Somewhere in the broiling clouds, Tom Ford would be lurking in an Apache gunship. After I’d finished chortling in the manner of one who has recently had his frontal lobes removed, I considered point two.

The appraisal of said man-bag was tersely signed, in an irritable italic scribble, “Terence Green”. Who was he? Why was he being so aggressive? What had I done to him? And why the hell did he want me to buy a tiny crocodile-skin bag for silly money? I freely admit that I engage on a happily bewildered level with most of civilisation, but the mystique of this was such that, as usual, my mind drifted off into the fluffy pink clouds I mentally retreat to everytime I encounter a strange and frightening concept, like an Inland Revenue form or self-serve checkout.

See, I can tolerate women’s fashion. I don't claim to understand the appeal of many, many pairs of shoes, but it's an issue I don't have to engage with, and that is as it should be. With a woman, when I go into Miss Selfridge or Miu Miu, I go into a sort of instant narcosis. It’s quite nice really. I just drift about with a faint smile plastered on my face, with very little idea of where I am, and then I come out again.

But I get anxious when a man called Terence Green threatens me with social ostracism if I don’t buy a very small, very expensive bag. This is beyond what I can be reasonably expected to understand. I thought fruity little bags where a definite female area, and that if I had one, I’d be swaying in the breeze, hung on a coat hook by my boxers within seconds, and beefy justice would be righteously served. But I am wrong.

I decided to research further. Trundling around my kitchen, boxer-dressed and deep in investigation, colliding with protesting family and pets, I read on. Did you know that £140 cufflinks are, “Vital right now”. I didn’t. Blood is vital, isn't it? Oxygen also. I’m told that sixty quid for a mug is quite reasonable. No, not told - assumed.

Now, I like mugs. I have quite a few, often with dry legends like, “Sit down, have a cup of tea. Everything will be alright”. A lifesaver, you will agree. I would pay up to a tenner on a mug, perhaps as much as twelve pounds if it was a paticularly good mug and I liked the shop attendant. Nevertheless, £60 seems a bit steep. If I was drinking £140 Cristal out of it, perhaps it’d make a crude sense. But I can’t afford Cristal. I can just about afford Cava, but I'd rather buy Tangfastics, and putting them in a mug would be weird.

Also, the writing disturbs me. The general tone is either screaming teenage girl off her tits on a generous quantity of meth, or barking border patrol guard at a Siberian check-point in Murmansk. Both are equally frightening, and the fashion journalist will often switch disconcertingly between the two - wired fashionista and psychotic squaddie - within a single sentence.

I don’t know, maybe I’m being a bit harsh. Nobody needs to be a Pulitzer Prize winner to write about clothes. But I draw the line when the general tone seems to be bashing randomly at a keyboard and making furious 2001 monkey noises. Also, being a fashion writer isn't a real job, really. Neither - for the record - are food critics, interior designers, and bankers.

I eventually glanced on this gem, which sums it all up rather wall, I think: “OMG, we’re actually in love” shrieked the fashion writer, gaunt limbs a-flail and smoky eyes a-twitch. She was referring to £99.99 Dolce & Gabbana bibs. As in, baby bibs. Surely they’d be more appropriate for the parents who bought them?.

Not for the first time, I decided that I was not really meant for this world, and went out for a bracing run, or a wheeze-and-swear-session, as I like to call them. I felt very slightly more macho as a result. It was strangely comforting.