This month marks ten years since I began to go insane. I’d always
preferred to dress somewhat more formally than my peers, and indeed
during my first semester at Austin College I tended to wear
slacks and a button-down shirt (this at a time & place when jeans
& t-shirts were the norm), but then I went home for Christmas and my
parents gave me a choice: I could get a stereo or a coat from Brooks
Brothers. What self-respecting young man wouldn’t go for
the coat?
I returned to school for my first JanTerm; that year I took a
month-long intensive course in J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth
writings (taught by Prof. Bill Moore, a fairly old-school professor).
So I owned a tweed coat, it was grey & blustery, I had several pipes
and I was studying Tolkien: no-one needed to draw me a
diagramme. And so I started to wear coat, tie & sweater-vest. It
was a blast: walking across the quad on a cold January morning, smoke
streaming from my pipe, looking forward to another day of musty old
Oxford dons—add in the fact that the girl I thought the finest in
all the world was in the same class, and life was pretty much
perfect.
And thus began my long sojourn in the land of the mildly deranged.
For the next three and a half years I was the guy in the coat & tie.
I loved it, pointing out that I was the real non-conformist;
after all, if everyone else is wearing rainbow tie-dyed shirts then
they’re hardly radical, are they? That’s quite true; what
I’d not realised is that no-one should want to be
different; it’s the normal guys who get girlfriends, the
non-eccentrics who advance in the world. It wasn’t until
I’d graduated and been working for a few years that I quit the
coat & tie thing, too late to have any real understanding of style.
Oh well.
Incidentally, if you’ve never had the chance to study Tolkien
on a grey day, wearing a tweed coat with a pouch in one pocket and a
tamper in the other, a tie on your neck, a sweater over that and a pipe
twixt your teeth—you really haven’t lived yet. It is more
than cool.
