Thoughts from between the sheets

It hasn't been the best start to the week to be honest with experiencing a severe migraine that has lasted several days so I've been in bed, curtains drawn and off food which is par for the course.

It's not something I am unfamiliar with having had these from early boyhood missing parties and schooldays and I can remember well staring at the curtains sometimes if I felt a little better reading a little from a Shoot annual or the Blue Peter books I had trying to keep my spirits up.

Days feel long when you're in bed all day.

This weeks coming Beano had arrived in the post as I have a subscription so I was able to look at that a little having a chuckle at Billy Whizz's and Dennis's adventures and the classic schoolboy and girl jokes printed at the bottom of some of the pages.

It isn't how it used to be this is true but when look at the longer picture, whenever new illustrators have come in how each character is drawn such as Dennis changes and with him a part of that is due to tying in with the made for tv cartoon version which given it was aimed to be shown on the BBC, they also placed some content restrictions.

The old school me may regret some of those changes but by doing so, they've kept it and good chunk of the old cartoon strips in children's minds today, relevant to them ensuring the comic is in business and not as with so many of my youth, no longer produced.

Boyhood fashion musings

Sometimes I talk a bit about attire on here, sometimes about whatever may be on my mind, sometimes more around boys regression and I feel that makes it different.

That's always been what makes this blog different than the others, it's a bit "behind the scenes" and it has a different sort of focus really.

One thing that has fascinated me really from childhood onwards are fashion trends and how they influence even those things that are not really meant to be fashionable by design.

For instance there was during the late eighties a push on Grandfather Shirts with rounded necks that never really took off and then there was the battle between the traditional duffle coat versus the cool 'mod' influenced Parker Jacket with its fur trimmed hood and the push in the late 80's for the Baseball jacket, not that as Brits we generally play that game.

I did have a few at the time!

But anyway the big one was waists on our underpants, shorts and long trousers because if you get low waisted shorts with high or natural waisted underpants you usually end up with a fair bit showing at the rear!

Thing is I remember when I was much younger how the waists of my shorts were and any 'tailored' longs too and they went to your natural waist - the thing we measure to get our trousers to fit - and that our shirt tails were longer than today.

Toss in our interlocking vests and underpants and that was snug.

This boys are at the natural waist and that was how it looked with a sleeveless jersey or standard jersey on.

As I got older I started to notice the waist bands started getting lower and starting to feel draughts more around the small of my back (my spine is curved, usually in pain and I notice stuff like this) and it got to the point that in America, then President Obama felt obliged to call out the trend for those wearing "low rider" trousers showing not just the waist band of their underpants but a fair bit of bum!

Where did this low waist trend come from and was it about just saving material costs?

Things come together eventually II

Last week I was talking a bit about how in a number of ways I am finding myself acting and being more of my emotional age not least with how the current Pandemic is affecting  life in a lot of ways.

For instance I have read from time to time comics although I haven't had a regular one in the way that growing up (allegedly) I had that you'd know that say every Wednesday you get the Beano come through the door or that at weekends my nan would give me the weeks Dandy although I do have a regular football magazine currently fortnightly.

That will be changing soon but just you know being to just say that able to say that to my parents as an everyday tidbit of chat without it being an issue is an indication that they too have accepted how I've changed.

I mean they do see me in and pre covid we'd been out for meals in grey school shorts, a school shirt with tie and grey turn over socks.

I did mention how I am seen and am treated in the wider community last time but an interesting thing happened this weekend as I was walking back home passing the house next door to a man I've know from (official) boyhood.

I walk passed looking from left to right with a woolly bobble hat on as a woman probably in their 40's or 50's opens the door to put the milk bottles out as I go by just striking my nose with a finger which is probably a nervous tic.

Anyway she looks toward me and shouts "You can look. I'm keeping a close eye on you" without adding any other word such as "Laddie" but the general tone is very much one of a woman addressing and admonishing a child.

It isn't a conversation with an adult. There is no "Excuse me why are you...." just a child pre-judged and cautioned anyway.

Obviously she is reading me as a boy! 

All I can say is it's a feeling I remember very much from being "Told off" for going down a path to the playground by a woman who lived by it. In Public!!!

Things come together eventually

We enter a new month as the old and the new as ever crisscross in my life as one sad thing was the funeral of Karen's father which followed about a year back her mothers, a man most respected by all of us and the wider community of which he was a pillar.

That on top of the loss of Karl's father kind of reminds you of how the bone age is advancing, a point he raised with me the other week when he enquired about my parents who naturally are of a similar age which bearing in mind we were all in the same class in Juniors isn't that surprising

The difference in a way is while they have some traits still from childhood, they're not mentally in grey shorts like me or pinafore dresses in the way some adult little girls may be, not that I'd know and if anything the thing I can say is today more perhaps than ever I've jettisoned much of the thin surface of simulated adulthood for the position of that boy called "sonny" by men and with just as much real say and authority as a ten year old child.

Covid has had lots of effects but for me the bigger one has been to just living more as a boy subservient to adult authority, having to follow the rules no matter what, being overseen, guided and verbally chastised standing in shortened grey shorts by men who are my adult authority figures as a boy of nine or ten who are younger in bone years.

I am more conscious of my emotional age finding my level returned just a boy and yet in such a trying uncertain situation more comfortable  for just doing what grown ups tell me.