Teething problems as zips tell the story of my life - Ian McMillan

In other words, I’ve never had a zip that hasn’t made me shout with frustration. They’re meant to be a simple device and, if you think about it, they’re a miracle of technology and design.

Except when I get my chubby fingers on them, that is. Then the miracle turns to dust.

Here's an example from last season at Oakwell watching The Mighty Barnsley FC on a freezing cold Tuesday night that began as a fairly chilly night and then the temperature plunged down to its boots but it didn’t matter to me because I’d got a good thick coat with a good thick zip.

I pulled the zip up but it wouldn’t go. I pulled it again and nothing happened. The zip had one job to do and it didn’t want to do it. I can’t be the first person in recorded history to imagine that zips have a malevolent mind of their own, can I? Well, this one had.

It wouldn’t move. The teeth refused to engage with each other. I tugged harder, which was, I now realise, a mistake.

There is no point in tugging harder, although suddenly (spoiler: this is a false dawn) everything was all right: the zip caught itself and the coat was zipped up and I was able to devote my attention to the match again, to the players zipping down the wing rather than my coat refusing to zip up.

Except that, like a player zipping down the wing who is brought to ground by a fierce tackle, the zip stopped in its tracks and then I noticed that it hadn’t really engaged at the bottom of the coat and so now the bottom of the coat flapped open like a cloak.

We’ve all been there. That excruciating time of irritation and embarrassment when you’re trying to make your zip work in a public place when you are surrounded by other human beings who, it seems like, have never had to suffer a malfunctioning zip.

You haul the zip down to the bottom of the coat again. You endeavour to wrestle the bottom of the zip into submission so that it will release and you can start again. The zip is sulky and doesn’t want to play. Some of the teeth of the zip appear to be twisted and out of place.

You have missed three goals and a sending off. Your goal is simply to zip your coat up and you wish you could send your coat off.

I know: in the great scheme of things, this is a really minor wrinkle on the face of the turbulent world.

But at the moment when the zip won’t zip it feels like the most terrible and irredeemable thing that has ever happened.

A philosopher might say ‘Yes, but if a zip doesn’t zip is it really a zip?’ to which I would reply that the philosopher has never tried to zip their coat up on an icy night at Oakwell.

The Zip That Refused to Zip: it sounds like a folk tale or a fable. Or the title of an early slapstick film. Or the story of my life.