I remember from my school history lessons that the ancient Britons, not having access to streaming services or council libraries, passed their leisure time decorating their faces with ‘wode’ – a primitive form of paint, usually blue, concocted from crushed berries.
Making wode was a hit and miss procedure.
Sometimes they got the mixture right. Occasionally the berry juice contained small stones making it painful to apply.
Well, who can claim they’ve never chosen the wrong wode?
This connects with an old article of mine I recently re-read in which, as I’ve done many times, I questioned the sanity of grown men who insist on wearing shorts all year round . . . even on bitterly cold January days when dogs find themselves frozen to the lamppost and the weather is ‘Unfit for man, beast . . . ‘nor Welsh Assembly Minister’.
Reading that old article, I felt like an ancient Briton myself because for years I’ve ranted until I was blue in the face about this weird obsession a growing section of the male population has with ‘getting their legs out’ even when there’s a risk of icicles forming on their knees . . . and other places I’m too much of a gentleman to refer to, ‘lest any sensitive reader has a touch of the vapours – as the Victorians used to say – and requires smelling salts waved under their nose.
Only a few weeks ago, I read an interview with a postman who was asked why he and his fellow posties wear shorts in the winter.
His answer? “If we wore long trousers in the rain and snow they’d be soaked through all day. But wearing shorts, only our bare legs get wet!”.
What?
Surely walking around delivering letters for hours on end in all winds and weather with cold, wet, bare legs can’t feel any more comfortable than it would if they were wearing wet trousers?
When I’m First Minister, the first law I’ll pass is that men who enjoy swaggering about in shorts all year round can continue doing so . . . provided they paint their bony knees with bright blue wode!
The sales of long trousers would go ballistic!