14 January 2026

The perils of black denim

Why doesn’t it wear as well as blue?

Photo by Charles Klein/Millennium Images

A week of punishing cold, although what we are being punished for I am not sure. Complacency? Cynicism? Sending an English cricket team to Australia without any adequate preparation? That I can believe. It is just as well I am unable to follow the cricket on the telly except for the 30-minute highlights available on the BBC. Looking at all that Australian sunshine while also being humiliated by the Australians for the first three Tests would have been more than I could have borne. It would make me feel, like the loveless protagonist of James Joyce’s story “A Painful Case”, as if I had been excluded from life’s feast. There is sunlight in plenty right here but it is a mockery of summer, a light that barely warms. So since Christmas I have been staying in bed against the cold, my body clock ravaged as I keep up with the game.

“What’s the difference? You stay in bed all the time anyway,” you might say. And there would be an element of truth in this. But I have already been out today, so there: an Odyssey that has taken me from the Hove-l to Superdrug, to Boots, three-quarters of a mile away, then back via the Levi’s store in Churchill Square, the Primark on Western Road, and, of course, dear old Waitrose.

It would take a Homer to do this adventure justice but I shall try my best. Superdrug and Boots were to find out where the blazes I could get my ears syringed now that my GP surgery has stopped offering the service. (I wondered why, and started imagining a series of ear disasters, the drums being burst, the Eustachian tubes dangling from the earholes like tapeworms. Sometimes I worry about my imagination.) One of the things they don’t tell you about ageing is that while the rest of you becomes slower and feebler, fit for nothing except grumbling, one’s earwax production goes into overdrive, as if making up for lost time. I shall spare you the details, but it means in effect that every six months or so I go deaf in at least one ear.

Superdrug, I was told at the desk, do not offer this service. They also confidently asserted that Boots do not syringe ears; my best bet would be to phone round among the independent chemists. As my local is more of a charging/recuperation centre for heroin addicts than an actual chemists, I thought it best not to even ask them. (The staff are very nice to these wrecks, stopping to chat with them while they swig their morphine or methadone, which cheers me greatly. But the shelves are bare of most things except remedies for gutrot.) I also suspected that Superdrug speak with forked tongue when it comes to Boots, so I went there and my suspicion was confirmed. I am told I have to book online but not in person, even though I am actually there, but I’m sure I’ll get round to it.

The journey to the Levi’s store is to buy my yearly trousers. Black 501s, 30in x 30in, a prescription that has been unchanged for decades – since the Major administration at least. Must be my sensible diet. They’re not cheap – £100 – but in January I still have some of my mother’s Christmas present left and I spend like a sailor on shore leave. These trousers will last exactly a year; by December they will develop a hole in the jeans’ perineum, for reasons I do not know, leaving me feeling and looking like a derelict. I suppose if they’re pretty much the only trousers I wear all year round then they’re going to sustain some wear and tear. By 1 January this hole becomes large enough to allow a £2 coin to pass through without touching the sides. Brighton is a tolerant city, but I don’t want to push it. Also, with the weather like this you do not want your nether regions feeling the icy touch of Jack Frost’s searching fingers.

And then – I don’t know how you can stand the excitement of this column. It should have come with a health warning – to Primark, to buy socks, undercrackers, and maybe an undershirt. The only black socks I could find come with a day of the week printed on each pair. I find this a little patronising. I can imagine the utility and indeed excitement of doing this for children’s socks, but I’m a grown-up and usually have a pretty good idea what day of the week it is. That there are adult males who need a reminder doesn’t give me great hope for the country; it is probably why Reform are riding so high in the polls. One exits the sock department via the floor for women’s clothes, a sea of fluffy pinks and pastel blues, and one realises that we still live in a country where gender norms are still rigidly maintained. I’m not much help, dressing in black and white the whole time, like an undertaker. Incidentally, why is it that black jeans are at their best when new, while blue jeans are best when old? It seems unfair.

And that’s my exciting day. Apart from the ’Trose, where a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label 12-year-old is still on sale at a very reasonable £24.50. I now have no more money but I feel I have a ticket to life’s feast, or at least to its nibbles on the periphery. For some reason – the weather, the hole in my trousers – I keep thinking of cocktail sausages.