The Savile Row of Cleethorpes has lost its charm

My shopping trip from Hell – in Mother’s jogging trousers

jem clarke

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he shares with his parents…

Mother had noticed my fugue state.

She was not wrong. It’s because I’ve outgrown my remaining trouser waists. So I flop around in a tartan dressing gown, sighing a lot.

For my brief sorties to the shops, she lends me her own very elasticated, very forgiving jogging trousers. It’s a bit rich. She has never jogged – or forgiven anyone.

Last week, she said, ‘I appreciate the vogue is for January to be dry or meatless – Lent for non-believers. But rather than thinking of one thing to give up, you spent the whole of January giving up, full stop.’

So I went for the first time to a shop specialising in trouser wear for the BMI-challenged: BIG BOY PANTS.

It wasn’t Savile Row. The Australian shop assistant didn’t so much snigger as laugh openly in my face. At one moment, he had to hang on to his counter to keep upright after the ‘mirth bomb’ ignited by my presence exploded.

Between joyous tears, he explained, ‘You’re the shortest customer we’ve ever had. You look like a grass snake who’s swallowed a tortoise.’

Much as I admire a simile in the morning, he added injury to insult by creasing up at my waist size.

‘It’s gold dust,’ he said. ‘You must come back next month.’

I failed to buy my joggers but remained in my mother’s. I had been transformed into a lumpen leisurewear sort, permanently parked up in my Parker Knoll. I wasn’t working from home – more weeping from home.

Mother suggested I make a February resolution list, to perk up my ideas for the rest of 2023. She gave me a notepad, with the first five resolutions already filled in, in capitals.

I spent most of the morning putting lines through ‘STOP BUYING EXOTIC

FLAVOURS OF JAM; FATHER’S PALATE CAN’T COPE’; ‘STOP SLOUCHING – YOU OF ALL GOD’S CREATURES NEED TO BE AS UPRIGHT AS YOU CAN’; ‘WASH UP LIKE BACH, NOT WAGNER – YOU BANG ABOUT LIKE A BIN MAN’.

My own efforts weren’t much better. Like the Booker Prize judges, I made an overlong longlist. I am such a contrary man, with both elitist and populist pulses in my cultural bloodstream. And so I’d written, ‘WATCH FEWER EPISODES OF REAL HOUSEWIVES’ and ‘WATCH MORE EPISODES OF REAL HOUSEWIVES’.

I decided to go with ‘watch more’. If Father can keep on loving Gilbert and Sullivan, I can keep on popping a few episodes of 40-plus ladies, giddy on afternoon martinis and sustaining endless shouting matches. I claim it’s lightweight but culturally significant.

The realness – and therefore value – of reality shows is often questioned by TV-critic puritans. But it seems bang-on for my family: families in a cycle of venomous criticism, falling out, falling back in, with occasional years of unresolved rifts.

Later in the week, I had confirmation that life is the same all over.

I waddled to my corner coffee shop.

On the way, I encountered a Cleethorpes woman, with a knitted lilac hat and one too many miniature poodles. Her tan comprised solely head-to-toe nicotine staining.

She approached me in the street and – believing me to move in more rarefied circles than I do – said, ‘If you see Queen Camilla, tell her not to worry. We had trouble in our family. Ended up with him and his wife moving to Mirfield. Only comes back now at Christmas, and then won’t stay longer than one teapot and a toilet break. And all over who borrowed some patio furniture.’

I said I would pass it on.

This was what I needed, I thought: some air and to be among people other than my family.

But then, as we went our separate ways, she spoiled everything by yelling after me, ‘Why are you wearing women’s trousers, you fat sod?’

With my unfashionable eye, I’d wrongly thought they’d be taken for sexless salopettes.

I resolved not to speak to poodle ladies any more – and to go out in my mother’s trousers only under the cover of darkness.

I doubt whether anyone else shares these resolutions. Perhaps we aren’t all the bloody same.