Ian McMillan: Peace breaks out in the Darfield Shirt Wars

MY mate, Luke, picked me up at Sheffield station the other day. As I approached his little car, he stuck his head out of the window and shouted: "Here he is, in his vicar's cords!"

I looked at my heavy corduroy trousers and blushed; Luke's dad was a vicar and when he was off duty, he always wore cords, perhaps because he liked them and perhaps because they signalled that here was an off-duty vicar who wasn't prepared to be asked hard questions about weighty theological matters because it was his afternoon off and he was going bird-watching.

I like cord trousers, and I don't mind looking like an off-duty vicar as long as nobody asks me for spiritual guidance when I'm in the shop buying my lottery tickets, but I have to admit that in the recent hot spell they did become a bit uncomfortable.

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It was a bit like playing Robin Hood on stage with the harsh lights slowly cooking you in your hose of Lincoln Green. I realised that, as spring creaks into summer, I'd have to go and buy some new clothes for the months without an R in them.

I dragooned my wife into taking me to a well-known out-of-town shopping centre, near Barnsley, even though she'd been suffering from a cold and a cough. That's true love, I told her. She didn't seem convinced. In fact, she coughed.

"What exactly are you going to buy?" she asked.

"I'm going to get some shirts and some trousers that aren't cords," I said, brightly.

She looked at me and said: "You've got plenty of shirts."

Now, to me, that's a reductive argument and one that ends up with me living in the same world as my dad, who spent decades wearing the same shoes and the same shirts simply because they were there.

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"I can give some of the old ones to the charity shop," I said.

Somehow I felt I'd already been defeated in the first skirmish of the Darfield Shirt Wars of 2010; my high ground had been breached and my only weapons were a few bent and twisted coat-hangers which were no good against my wife's cough-inflected logic.

I opened a new front in the conflict: "Well, I do need some new trousers that aren't cords. They're just too hot for the summer and they make me look like a vicar."

She responded with an argument as sharp as a fixed bayonet. "Check what you've got in the wardrobe first," she said.

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I knew what she meant: there were a couple of pairs of trousers in the wardrobe that I'd grabbed from the shop during similar shopping trips in years past and tried on at home and never worn. The leg was too long or the waist was too small or they just didn't feel right.

I trudged up to the wardrobe and had a look: there was a pair that could be worn today and a pair that could be worn by last year's fat version of me. I felt that I'd scored a direct hit.

"They're nice but they're too big," I said.

"You could buy a belt," she coughed.

I felt sulky and daft. "I need to buy some trousers that fit," I said, almost stamping my feet, flamenco-style, but not quite.

I carried on. "And this year I'm going to buy some T-shirts that I can wear without looking silly."

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It's been an ambition of mine for more than a year to be able to wear a T-shirt without looking like a fat bloke squeezed into a garment that's far too small or is so big that it looks like a Bedouin tent, and I reckon that now I can do it.

This argument swayed her, and we set off to the shopping mall. She was still coughing and I was still grumpy but at least we were on our way.

At the mall, I was pleased to note that I wasn't the only middle-aged gentleman with his wife in tow. I was quite enjoying myself at this point, seeing myself in the models whose photographs appeared above the

T-shirts and trousers.

Somehow, despite my age and experience, I'd fallen for that old retailer's trick of believing that the buying of a T-shirt would make me younger, more successful, sexier and, in some strange way, spiritually fulfilled. Maybe I should have a word with Luke's dad.

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The man and wife next to me were having a bad time. They were both thin and stringy and he was saying, as he pointed at a shirt: "You said I'd like this and I don't!"

She set off at pace and he followed her, almost skipping to keep up.

"Can we find something we both think I'll like?" he said, his voice creaking like a shed door.

I smiled affectionately at my wife: at least I knew what I liked. Even if I couldn't always find it.

Onward to the racks of polo shirts.