Bulging Bellies and Follicle Follies

I need a new pair of pants. But clothes shopping has become one of my pet hates.

Once upon a time, all I had to do was pick a pair off the rack and get the hem taken up. People with my then-sylphish waist were all intended to be 6'7” bundles of animated pipe cleaners. But as I have advanced in age, the dreaded middle-age spread arrived. Now it is a juggling act between finding pants that fit, that are not so tight that the seam at the back takes cover between my hairy buttocks, that I can put my hand into the pocket without something tearing, that makes my gut look a little less prominent but all the while avoiding the look of an over-sized potato sack with a pair of feet attached at the end.

Forget 'does my bum look big in this?' It is more a case of 'does my fat gut bulge out over the top like a hideously malformed muffin top?' The real irony is that I have a serious case of beer gut – except that I haven't had a beer in more than eight years.

Back in the Rubenesque days, women with more 'fulsome' figures were the epitome of all that was desirable. When is it going to be the man's turn? When are going to see male models that reflect what all too many of us end up like? Forget the rock-hard abs down the catwalk. What about the soft-bellied bloke with thinning hair that is going grey and his bad knee from a football injury giving him trouble because the weather has turned cold?

And then there is... the hair. Just what, pray tell, was the Dear Lord thinking of, when he decided it would be a good idea for men to loose the hair on the head, replacing it with follicle outbursts else where in the body? Do we really need tufts of hair deciding to emerge from our already-deafening ears? Was it really necessary to give us things emerging from our nostrils like lima vines, other than boogers? And why oh why, the tufts of hair appearing on the back where only an over-active contortionist could reach?

According to Darwin, we have evolved from the great primates. I suspect as we blokes get older, our bodies succumb to racial memory and start trying to devolve back to our origins.

I need a new pair of pants.