Suits You, Sir

Every couple of years Mrs Crox comes out with it and says that I'm a scruffy herbert, and I'd look so much nicer ... so much sexier ... in decent clothes, especially a suit. Now, I used to have a couple of really nice designer-yet-off-the-peg suits, but they've long been recycled into industrial draught excluders. And it so happens that I am experiencing an ongoing crisis of entrouserment, in that almost all my trousers have got paint/putty/glue/sawdust/chickenshit/miscellaneous biological stains/other (delete as applicable) ingrained into them; have seams/buttons/flies much repaired and repatched; or have shrunk, especially in the midlands. The subject of suits came up in the course of havering over a job application (see post below) and although I decided in the end not to apply for the job, the thought of suits remained.

The task, then, was to measure myself. And so, equipped with a tape measure and those few clothes that still fitted, I discovered that I have a 52" chest, a 48" waist and a 32" inside leg. A frame, indeed, that one might call 'Olympian' (though Crox Minor refers to it in public as 'Gargantuan').

My first visit was to ASBO ASDA which is really good for clothes - plentiful, cheap, and well-made, and often in sizes for the more prominent male. This is why, I expect, that in America it's called 'Whale Mart'. Sadly, it was not to be. The suits, though dead cheap, didn't quite aspire to covering my stupendous deportment. The jackets went up to a pigeon-chested 48", and the entrouserments - well, let's not go there. I did come out of ASDA with a couple of XXXL T-shirts and a pair of underpants with pictures of Superman on them, which I guess is a kind of consolation prize, but the Quest for Suits remained unfulfilled. At the checkout I opined to the salesperson that I'd have to shop for suits at Mr Fat Bastard, but this jocund japery was met by a stony silence.

That's when Mrs Crox suggested Debenhams, a deportment department store which has furnished the Crox wardrobe in the past. A couple of clicks and I was on their website, which advertised suits for the larger gentleman. So it was that Mrs Crox and I found ourselves at the Norwich branch of the store. A 52" jacket in dark charcoal with a subtle yet stylish pinstripe was a perfect fit, but the 48" trousers were too baggy. "Perhaps you'd like to try a smaller size?" suggested the helpful assistant - the nicest thing anyone's said to me for ages. The 46" trousers fitted me like a ferret - the salesperson said he thought I looked great. "I bet you say that to all the boys" was my riposte. I bought the jacket and not one but two pairs of trousers. Given that the Debenhams Big+Tall range is called 'Centaur', I felt that two pairs of trousers had to be a working minimum.
Mrs Crox pronounces the results satisfactory, though Crox Minor said that I looked like Cobra Bubbles, the secret agent in Lilo and Stitch.
I also bought a couple of shirts. Now, when I go into the office on Monday wearing my swanky new duds, people are sure to ask me whether I'm going to a job interview. "You might say that," I'll respond - "but I could not possibly comment".

Mental Gridlock

I am now so overwhelmed with things I have to do, things I've agreed to do, and things I'd rather like to do except that the prospect of actually doing them is terrifying, that I have become frozen into a kind of mental gridlock.

Let's see.

My friendly editor at BBC Focus has called me to say that it's time I wrote my regular column. I really enjoy doing this. Sometimes I come up with an idea, sometimes he does, but it's usually a collaborative effort such that my sesquipedalonious circuitomnambulations are trimmed to sentences as crisp as an iceberg lettuce straight from the fridge. He'd like my column by first thing Tuesday, which would be fine, except ...

... that I'm taking part in a panel discussion on Monday evening, which will necessitate staying over in London, which I always enjoy. The discussion is all about the relationship between science and science fiction, with a heavy emphasis on film. And while on the subject of SF and fantasy ...

... I am getting rather behindhand with the collection of material for Mallorn, the Journal of the Tolkien Society, which I edit. The magazine only comes out twice a year, and the next deadline is Christmas, but I have looked at my calendar and it's already the first week of November. Christmas also happens to be ...

... the deadline I have set myself for completing the first draft for a proposal for a non-fiction book. Read that again, slowly - it's the first draft of a proposal. If I ever get to write the actual book...

... I'd have to prioritize more effectively requests I've had to write material for a Tolkien website, or to go and give seminars in various countries, or to get my head round next year's prospects for conferences I might attend, at home and abroad.

What about that thing I'd like to do that's so terrifying? Well, I have decided to apply for a job for which I am thoroughly unsuited and which is way out of my league. The funny thing is, people whose opinions I trust think it's a great idea and are encouraging me to apply. This worries me, for it suggests a number of possibilities, none of them very appealing.

The first is that I am in the habit of underselling myself and my own abilities to such an extent that I can't see them when clearly other people can. But is this true? After all, my work colleagues seem to have a fair measure of the limits of my capabilities.

Or do they?

When I mentioned that I might apply for this particular job the response wasn't laughter, but stunned silence, which could mean either max respec' - or, more likely, incredulity at the extent of my own self-delusion. Whateva. If I go ahead and apply, I am likely to be putting a great deal of hard work into an application that won't stand a chance of success, which would be embarrassing, and also a waste of time. If I don't apply - well, that would also be embarrassing, and an admission - to me, at any rate - that at 47 I have passed my peak and it's too late to try out new and ambitious projects.

Taking all this together, my only solution is to ignore all of it and write a reflective, self-indulgent blog post, rather like this one, in fact, as a way of getting it off my chest, before collapsing on the sofa with the dog, and thinking about nothing more alarming than going to bed.

Nighty night.