Here’s some news that should surprise precisely no one. Nearly half of teenage girls are put off doing physical exercise because they hate their school PE kit. Well, of course they do. Girls’ PE kits look as if they were conceived by perverts who have taken a night class in sadism. If you wanted to design a look guaranteed to fill already self-conscious pubescent girls with shame, embarrassment and the absolute certainty that 14-year-old boys are copping an eyeful of their knickers, you couldn’t do much better than the traditional, short gym skirt — or, as some creepily still call it, “gymslip”, though technically that’s a slightly different garment and a word mainly now reserved for top-shelf magazines.
Girls interviewed for the study by the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation with Virgin Active spoke of their kit being too small, making them feel ill-at-ease and “ugly”. That’s without the stone you instantly seem to gain when you put one on. As for the old-fashioned elasticated “gym knickers” in bottle green there are simply no words. Then there’s the other PE “problem”. In my sepia school memory I see not only corned-beef-mottled legs chapped in the biting Lancashire wind but also boys gathering to smirk at breasts bobbing like pistons under thin Aertex tops during the 100m sprint. Bad enough if you look like Cara Delevingne; if you’re more on the hefty side then PE must be torture. At least my school eventually allowed us to wear little shorts. But why must children, whatever their gender, reveal their bodies at all? Emily Marshall, 13, has just won a competition to design a PE kit girls would actually feel comfortable wearing. She came up with leggings, tops with higher necks and in dark colours that hide sweat patches. This, you may have noticed, is exactly what adults choose to wear when exercising. Because it makes obvious sense.
We live in times when school uniform shops have had to start selling trousers with 50in waists and blazers with 54in chests (yes, really). Two thirds of UK adults are overweight or obese. By today’s standards Billy Bunter, prewar fictional schoolboy porker, would be something of a lightweight. According to Magnet, Bunter was age 15 and weighed 14 stone, 12.5lb. These days nearly a tenth of children are already clinically obese when they start school age four. Diet is the main issue obviously but I’d say that one thing that definitely won’t help is to make PE traumatic and humiliating. And yet for decades thousands of children have been shoved into clothes they loathe, possibly giving them a lifelong aversion to exercise, while gradually the national average heft has grown.
Luckily I was quite good at sport but remember painfully the girls who dreaded it, weeping, feigning period pains or pretending they’d forgotten their kit (big mistake, that, for then you were led to the “spares” box filled with smelly, sweat-stained horrors). One of life’s unfathomable mysteries is that for years many schools have come over all prim and proper if girls hitch up their uniform skirts an inch, yet on the playing fields order them to wear garments that display their entire undercarriage. Just let pupils wear leggings or tracksuit bottoms and it may herald a new enthusiasm for PE. It won’t cure the problem of boys staring at jiggling breasts, granted, but then I have a hunch we won’t solve that one as long as schoolboys have eyes.
Lineker takes it on the chin
George Clooney (surprise, surprise) has been voted the world’s top MAG — Man Ageing Gracefully. Runners-up include Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp and Daniel Craig. These men embrace greyness or appear completely at ease in their own skin, says the survey conducted by a Manchester hair transplant centre (bit confusing, that. All these men have full heads of hair, but let’s press on).
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Notable by his absence, sadly, was another silver fox, Gary Lineker. It hasn’t been Gary’s week. He got Twitter stick after Match of the Day for sporting a strange, sparse goatee beard, which, as his public helpfully pointed out, made him look like a low-budget magician or a man who had “eaten a bowl of iron filings without using his hands”. Conceding that it was “crap”, a chastened Gary has vowed to shave it off. It does remain mildly fascinating that so many men of a certain age seem to think this is the optimum time to wear a flea-bitten stoat on their chin. Still, each to their own. At least it shows male TV presenters get flak about their appearance too. Which is an equality of sorts, I suppose.
A ‘fatberg’ to sink all of us
The best way to dispose of an old tennis ball — don’t you find? — is to flush it down the toilet. Ditto unused paint, the odd wedge of wet wipes or slab of Trex. It’s so quick and easy! I also hear that some people throw their dead hamsters in the crapper and flush the chain. Well, why not? The more the merrier.
Except, no — no, it really isn’t. Which is why poor London sewer workers have spent four days clearing a rancid 80m “fatberg”, the length of a Boeing 747, from beneath the streets of Shepherd’s Bush. I can’t believe anyone would flush a thick, fibrous wet wipe down their khazi, never mind an actual plank of wood. Yet this is what sewer workers have found when breaking up these modern, grotesque matter masses. People will flush away anything because it rids them of a problem. Trouble is it then becomes someone else’s. Whatever those workers get paid, it definitely isn’t enough.