I don’t entertain many pet peeves but one that I must admit to is a disdain for sheepish “fashionistas”; those mindless morons who can’t think for themselves. We are all entitled to entertain our own aesthetic tastes and to cultivate a personal style that we like and that we feel represents us and who we are. Yet many idiots rush out and buy the next thing because everyone else is wearing it; that Fear Of Missing Out. This brings me to ripped jeans.

I have nothing against them. In fact I think they’re great. Call me dated but what happened to a bit of pedigree? A bit of rock and roll? Ripped jeans need to be frayed and hanging from your hips by their threads because they’ve seen a thing or two. They’ve been to countless concerts with you and survived half a dozen festivals. They’ve been with you weekend after weekend for months as you lay on your back on the drive restoring your dad’s old Beatle and covered with spots of paint from that time you repainted the kitchen. That smudge of Prussian Blue on your thigh from when you wiped your hand on your leg at the studio. They are a badge of rank and Amen. Then you have “snipped jeans”; those stupid skinny designer ones at a couple of hundred Euros a pop. The ones that some poor soul in a sweat-shop in the Philippines was told to take a pair of scissors to at the knee, for your benefit. What the fuck are those?

I know it takes all sorts in this world and I assure you that I am a believer….but the self-absorbed ponce I once saw swanning up Via Laetana a few years ago looked like he had just about made it away from a hold-up. Here was this tall Nordic looking guy, with a hair-sprayed flick worthy of the best of the New Romantics of the eighties, sauntering up the street in nothing but a pair of white skivvies, sun glasses and some work boots quite deliberately unlaced as he paused time after time to look at his reflection in the shop windows, looking like he felt he owned the place and the moment. Tea, double you, hey, tea!

El Salvador has, unfortunately, been a dangerous country for countless reasons for the best part of forty years. He has since moved on, God bless him, but my great uncle Ricardo was once the victim of a car-jacking as he drove home from work in San Salvador. Having stopped at some traffic lights, some worthless piece of shit got into the car, held a gun at his head and demanded he hand over his wallet, the car keys….and not just. Tio Ricardo was in his eighties when this occurred and the poor man was, dare I say, “lucky enough” to be left on the curb with nothing and in nothing other than his underwear. I’m told he walked the eight or ten blocks back to his house. The cleaner saw him coming down the road from one of the windows and said to tia Celia,  his wife, “I think don Ricardo has been drinking”. The indignity of it all.