4 minute read
Grumpy Oldie Man
Black tie – worse than the Black Death
A friend’s party meant the ultimate torture – ordeal by bow tie
Advertisement
matthew norman
It came as a shock recently to discover, in some long-abandoned cranny of this ravaged psyche, a residue of what felt like self-respect.
Any epsilon male sunk deep into middle age, and deeper into irrelevance, has no business caring what others think of him.
He simply assumes that, in so far as they think of him at all, they think of him with either contemptuous indifference or mild loathing. In this, they precisely mirror his feelings about himself.
Yet a fragment from an ultra-rare party invitation – the previous one, from memory, was in celebration of Edward VIII’s abdication – unleashed a torrent of appearance-related concern.
Beneath the date, time, venue and reason (anniversary) came the scariest phrase in the language: ‘Black tie’, it read.
Now there must be those, I suppose, who are not utterly petrified of those two words.
To the borderline dyspraxic Jew, however, it would be less distressing to see in their place ‘Iodine pills provided, but please bring your own Geiger counter’. Or even, scrawled in the host’s hand, ‘We’ve put you next to Ann Widdecombe. She’ll be needing a dance partner after dinner.’
For the record, it isn’t the matter of tying the garment that induces the panic. A man’s gotta know his limitations, as Dirty Harry counselled a soon-to-be corpse, and I know mine well enough never to have attempted such a feat.
There is a higher chance of my winning Winter Olympics bronze in the two-person bobsleigh, partnered by Ms Widdecombe, than of my tying a tie of any colour into a shape capable of being mistaken by an averagely observant Basset Hound for a bow.
What induced the panic was that I have always struggled, and seldom victoriously, with a clip-on. Putting it it. He was adept at such tasks, he said, and would clip it firmly in place on our arrival.
He kept his word, accepted a lavish tip and drove off. The bow stayed rigidly level for almost 15 seconds before slipping the clasp and resuming its diagonal.
So it was that I found myself doing something that might once have earned an appointment in Bow Street. Whether importuning strangers and for help with a bow tie in a public lavatory would have seen me banged up is hard to call. That would have depended on the individual beak.
Eventually, the tie was clipped into place by a bemused but kindly fellow guest, and so it miraculously remained for some hours.
I would have stayed later but left shortly after midnight, when the tie resumed its diagonal stance. Energised by a magnificent evening, I started walking home. The booze having ravaged my meagre store of motor control, I was zigzagging along Park Lane, eyes rooted to the pavement and muttering dementedly, when the sound of approaching steps made me glance up.
Walking towards me, some four feet away, a phalanx of gigantic young men formed a protective hemisphere around a smaller, older one.
‘Good grief,’ I instinctively yelled. ‘Mr President!’
‘Hello,’ said Bill Clinton, a dead ringer in his skinny dotage for Dick Van Dyke, with no hint of the genuine warmth he’s so fabled for synthesising.
I offered a cheery ‘Not so bad’, preparatory to engaging him in geopolitical chat. But the Secret Service detail seemed unkeen, and moved him briskly along.
‘Weirdo,’ I heard one say as they accelerated towards Hyde Park Corner.
‘Yeah,’ said someone else, possibly an erstwhile leader of the free world. ‘And what a terrible f****** tie!’
round the neck is manageable. Clipping the clippy bit into the invisible receptacle is less so.
Before the dinner, the hostess assured me, with typical sweetness, that it was not obligatory. ‘Many of my friends are far from certain to wear any sort of tie,’ she said. ‘Trousers would be nice,’ she went on, ‘and even some clothing above the waist. But the black tie couldn’t matter less.’
Yet somehow it did matter. What if someone of whom I stood in awe should see me black-tieless, and mistake manual incompetence for arrogant disdain for convention?
It’s like being offered an honour. As someone of the Left once explained when attacked for taking an MBE, he lacked the vanity to refuse it.
But which awe-inspiring character could you expect to see, wondered the hostess, on this night? ‘I dunno,’ I said. Marcus Rashford? Jessica Chastain? The President of the United States?
Her reassurance that none of the above was likely to be present didn’t cut it. It had become a matter of honour.
I confess to moments when I came close to breaking. After 47 futile minutes spent fiddling with the invisible clasp, tears pricked the eyeballs as they invariably do at that point in the duvetchanging process when one finds oneself wholly encased within the cover.
In the Uber, with the bow sloping at a fetching 43-degree angle, I confided the problem to the driver, and sought his permission to go tieless.
Quite the stickler, Abdul wouldn’t have
