Everything has a limit, that’s the way life works. But when this limit is exceeded—the worker asked to work another weekend one too many times, or the bird mocked by the pigeon, pushing the hound past the point of no return—then catastrophe descends, striking with Bruce Lee like force!

Take the humble jacket for example. I grew up in a small village where a jacket was considered a jacket by way of simple and accurate definition: that is, a thing of warmth—practicality and comfort combined to produce a nice piece of outside wear that feels good and looks great. But alas this is not the ethos any longer. Suddenly, the jacket has become something else. I give you example A: yesterday in town and the jacket I came across.

The man was wearing an ENORMOUS jacket. The kind of jacket that looked like a joke it was trying so hard. It had all the standard jacket stuff about it, but was five times bigger than it should have been. Were we in the Canadian Rockies and besieged by the threat of Grizzly Bears and wickedly low freezing temperatures? No! We were in East Anglia, in March, and we were under the enclosed protective roof of a bus-stop–

It’s hard to pin-point the place in time when Jacket’s stop being Jackets and became JACKETS. But what I do know is this: when I leave my house I do not expect to have my simple and elegant jacket made to look a laughing stock! I simply won’t stand for it. So much so that I have started a small society called The Society Against The Mocking Of Standard Jackets. I do hope you will start your own society or join mine. Let us pull together and eliminate this deadly foe! (Except where it’s cold, of course, like in Canada.)