mostly david ephgrave

I finally had an excuse to not wear any trousers in public today when my cat fell asleep on them. It’s good to have an alibi for once. This is the exception that proves the rule. While I’ve wandered the streets of my hometown bottomless countless times with no adequate reason, today it’s through no fault of my own. This is my story and I’ll stick to it, however much the prosecution tries to slander my name. They can look at the evidence above and weep . The cat / trouser situation came to pass within minutes of me taking my jeans out of the tumble dryer. My cat, like all felines, is opportunistic. She doesn’t hang about. No sooner had I folded them up and placed them on the table so I could return to the kitchen to close the dryer door, than she leapt in to action. I turned around to find her already curled into a circle as if she’d been there all along. Half time score: Cat 1, David Nil. She remained there, fast asleep, until I got out o...

There’s a point in the early hours of the morning when jeans become noisy. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment, but it tends to be when you sneak into your bedroom after a gig, at 2am, in pitch darkness, trying to be quiet so as not to wake your wife. It’s at this time that denim is at its swishiest. It doesn’t make that much racket during the day. When I walked through Hitchin town centre this morning, the streets were packed. Most of these people were wearing jeans. Despite their abundance, I didn’t hear a single example of thigh against thigh. Perhaps I wasn’t listening hard enough. What is it about the dead of the night that makes walking in jeans so dinful? Maybe it’s a sound we’ve got so used to during the day, we just blank it out. It’s like Hoppípolla by Sigur Rós: it’s on television so often we never hear it. Thank God I wasn’t wearing cords. Then I would have worked up some serious friction.

I don’t seem to have any smart clothing. When it comes to my wardrobe, I’m a little bit stuck in a rut. I have a handful of shirts and a couple of pairs of jeans in almost constant rotation. I haven’t got to the point where I wear the same outfit on the same day of each week, but it’s getting pretty close. The problem is I have very little money. When I do buy anything new, I’m usually so pleased that I wear it almost constantly; washing it every few days until all that remains is a faded husk of its former glory. The last time I had a large-scale wardrobe rethink was when I was doing Dreamboats & Petticoats in the West End (thud goes the namedrop). I was earning enough then to facilitate a little frivolity. I didn’t buy anything crazy, like a gold lamé jacket – but I did stock up on a couple of nice pairs of shoes and a few natty shirts. (That's right: I did just say 'natty'.) This was now over three years ago...