Incredible scenes today at Corner Cottage as a seasonal milestone is attained with due fanfare and celebration. As spring flourishes outdoors, with flowers unfolding, leaves unfurling, birds revealing their finest mating-season plumage, it is time for your aged correspondent to disclose his long-hidden shanks by the ritual donning of shorts.
Let’s leave aside for now the wearing of shorts for cycling or running: these are classified as specialist sportswear and thus not a choice entirely dictated by warm weather and the desire for comfort in the open air. Today, by choice, on emerging from the shower, it was shorts to the fore, through preference and freely selected without fear or favour.
We Australians come from a long line of shorts wearers – the colonies seem to have brought out the Empire’s knees, presumably in an effort to cow the unfortunate native populations with the patriotic glory of their blinding whiteness. This proud history was replicated in the school uniforms we were required to wear in Zimbabwe, symbolising the historic role of the education system in turning out fresh colonial administrators.
Of course, in hot countries there’s a great deal of practicality involved in wearing shorts. The epidermal exposure contributes significantly to bodily cooling, while for the man of action, freedom from restrictive clothing enables greater freedom of movement.
Fashions change over the years, though, from the voluminous below-the-knee bags in favour around World War 2, to the bum-huggers of the ‘70s. In the 90s shorts got big again, epitomised by The Dude’s fetching chequered numbers in The Big Lebowski (a movie that rewards rewatching for more reasons than shorts appreciation.)
Then there was the regrettable era of shants – which the interwebs define with a po-faced tone as “An article of clothing too long to be designated as shorts, but too short to be considered pants”—pants in this context meaning trousers, not knickers, as previously discussed. Not a look for the faint of heart, but spot-on for those requiring instant hip-hop street cred.
Jorts, of course, will always be with us – these being jeans hacked down into shorts, which have long existed as a sub-genre of jeans. As long as jeans are with us – and indications are that they always will be – their truncated cousins will follow: a simple way of prolonging the lifespan of a pair of old faithfuls.
Sport, though, is the undisputed kingdom of the short pant. All those practical considerations regarding cooling and freedom of movement apply doubly when striving on the field of play. And over the decades, length and tightness have fluctuated in line with mainstream fashion. Technology of course has a huge influence here, summarised in one values-laden word: lycra.
Few things polarise the masses so completely as the stretchy, clingy, revealing-yet-concealing phenomenon that is lycra. The haters focus on cyclists – for some reason, it’s lycra that seems to enrage them more than any other annoying attribute cyclists may display. I’ll be the first to admit that lycra can be an acquired taste when displayed on the larger athlete, but all the excuses are true: it is more comfortable; it does wick your sweat away; and for all that it matters for we larger individuals, the lack of flapping cuffs and hems aids aerodynamic efficiency. And some of us need all the help we can get.
When lycra is sported by the muscular sprinter – think the legendary Usain Bolt – there’s much less complaint. Go figure.
All this, of course, refers solely to men’s fashion. Women in shorts are subject to numerous extra considerations which I’m unqualified to enumerate. Suffice to say, in the spirit of equality, all genders should revel in the freedoms conferred by short pants. Whether the fashion houses of Paris, London and New York do right by them – or we chaps – is another story. It’s a simple formula, people – let’s stick to the basics, folks.
Here in Braidwood, hardier souls than I have been sporting their shorts for weeks – when you’re engaged in outdoor work, you feel the need a lot earlier to free the knees. Don’t knock them – it makes good sense when the mornings are chill but by midday the sun’s toasty and you can shed your jacket and get to work in comfort.
So here I am, contemplating my pale, intermittently-hairy pins shining with a kind of bioluminescence in the spring sunshine. It’s comfy and liberating, with the breeze stirring the follicles and UV rays tingling across the tender skin. Like the blue-tongue who lives under the deck, I’m recharging after the winter – as if we’re solar-powered beings and sunning ourselves will give us the boost we need to power us through another year.
Some say “sun’s out, guns out,” but the true measure of a man as the season turns isn’t the buff arms he exposes to the elements, but his proud, unabashed legs. In short, look on these knees and weep.