Corduroy

Every Christmas, I ask my loved ones for at least two pairs of corduroy trousers. Off with a sigh tramps my girlfriend, who knows that fashion cycles dictate that corduroy will be ‘in’, and therefore purchasable, only every fourth or fifth year or so. For three or four years corduroy will be invisible. Shop assistants will look askance at anyone who dares even mention it. Then corduroy is rediscovered by whoever decides these things, and it’s everywhere. Cushions are in corduroy. Dogs wear corduroy. I saw a corduroy tie the other day. At such times we corduroy lovers stock up, conscious of the long corduroy-free winter that will inevitably follow.

I bought my first two pairs of corduroy trousers in 1979, when I was at university. One was blue, one was brown, they were both thick corduroy and I wore them both with great pleasure. Until one day I happened to be present when two of my friends decided to ingest some magic mushrooms. One of them is now dead (nothing to do with mushrooms), the other is an eminent and extremely rich merchant banker. Like many drug neophytes, they wondered why the mushrooms weren’t working and so took some more — far too many, as it turns out. I was there in an observational capacity (i.e. to take them to hospital if it all went wrong) and they decided, among other things, that my brown corduroy trousers were watching them. Indeed, after the drugs had worn off, these remained ‘the watching trousers’, and both of my friends reacted with alarm, leaching into abject terror, whenever they saw me wearing them. So obviously I did wear them, possibly a little too often.

Did I become a writer because of my fondness for corduroy? Or did my writerly leanings propel me in a corduroy direction? I’m not sure I care, to be honest, but I would say that there remains a fellowship of corduroy-wearers that transcends all other considerations.