The Shacket Chronicles: Part Two

If you've visited this website before, you might recall reading my long and anguished account of the new shacket I bought myself earlier this year. You might recall thinking, my God, I can't believe anyone could write this many words about a shacket. Perhaps you even thought, well, there's no way there could possibly be anything left to say about this shacket.

If you did think that, I'm afraid you were wrong.

To recap, when last we left our hero (me), I'd bought a new and much-complimented shacket — only to discover, a few months later, that it was a somewhat notorious one. Bradley Cooper had been photographed wearing it in GQ; if you googled "overshirt", it was one of the pictures that came up in the first page of results. A friend of mine, while out in London one day, had seen someone else wearing it. (She texted me a picture.) As a result, I'd started feeling self-conscious about wearing it, but as I said in the original blog post, I'd reached the conclusion that I shouldn't let it bother me: nobody really cared what I was wearing, shacket or not.

I confess there was a certain degree of poetic license to this conclusion, because it nevertheless did continue to bother me. Luckily, however, it was the summer by this point, so it wasn't shacket weather anyway. I put it away and didn't think about it for a few months. And when the autumn rolled around again, I took it out and wore it a couple of times without incident. Everything, it seemed, had turned out okay.

Then, at the beginning of October, I went to a conference. I arrived on a Monday night, and made the bold decision to wear my shacket to the opening party. If I was nervous, at the back of my mind, I shouldn't have been: it went fine. I schmoozed. I ate some cheese straws. My boss and I stopped and had some BBQ for dinner on the way back to the hotel. Nobody even commented on the shacket. Everything, it seemed, was still going okay.

The next morning was warmer — unseasonably warm, actually, too warm for a shacket. But I folded it up and put it in my bag anyway, in case I needed it later in the day, and headed out to the conference.

Reader, as soon as I got there — and this is not poetic license, it literally happened the moment I walked in and sat down — I realised that the man across the aisle from me, as you no doubt will have guessed by now... Was wearing the shacket.

My heart started to race. Sure, I was okay for the time being: my shacket was tucked away safely in my bag. Nobody ever needed to know. But what would I do if it did get colder later? Take out my shacket and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? Or leave it in my bag, and avoid the shame and disgrace?

Before long my boss had arrived too. I was sure I saw him do a double-take, noticing the matching shacket across the aisle, but he said nothing, and I told myself I was imagining it. I thought back to my blog post from all those months earlier: nobody even notices these things. It's not a big deal.

Hard to keep telling yourself that, though, when in every conference session you walk into for the rest of the day, there's that stupid shacket staring you back in the face. Reader, it didn't even look that good on him. He'd paired it with entirely the wrong trousers and shoes. He looked like a somewhat hopeless middle-aged nerd trying to cling to his youth with a brightly-coloured shacket.

This was in itself, as you can imagine, a freshly uncomfortable realisation.

Still, it could have been worse. The conference was interesting, the venue beautiful. I schmoozed some more. I ate some crisps. My boss and I stopped back at the hotel to drop our stuff off before that evening's party. By the time I was waiting in the queue for the bar, and saw the man in the shacket again, I barely even noticed.

Reader.

Reader.

It was not the same man. There was a second man at the conference, openly wearing the same shacket, and if I was anything to go by, there were doubtless dozens more with the damn thing abashedly hidden away in their bags. The party was at a museum, and I texted my wife that I felt like I was in that scene at the end of The Thomas Crown Affair, where all of a sudden the Met is filled with identically dressed men.

At least, I thought, this second man looked better in it. He'd paired it with jeans and a beanie. He looked cool, or at least as cool as I imagined I looked while wearing it. Then my boss tapped me on the shoulder.

"There's another one," he said. "Have you got yours with you too? It's like The Thomas Crown Affair in here."

I assure you this is also not poetic license.

"I left it at the hotel," I mumbled. "Thank God."

My boss nodded sagely — a middle-aged man himself. "This is why I always wear black," he said. "At least if someone else has the same coat as you, nobody notices."

Naturally, nobody was wearing the shacket at the conference the next morning, though I sheepishly put mine on again once I was waiting on the cold platform for the train back to London. I half-expected to get to my reserved seat and find someone else there wearing it too, but I didn't, and the rest of the trip passed with no further shacket sightings.

At this point you might find yourself, once again, thinking that there couldn't possibly be anything left to say about this shacket. You would, once again, be wrong.

Back in London, I didn't dare put the shacket back on. Who knew what further embarrassment might await if I did? Instead I just left it flung over the back of the sofa in our spare room, and tried not to think about it — though of course I did think about it, every day, not least of all because that sofa is in the background when I take video calls at work. There it always was, floating just over my shoulder. What a freaking metaphor.

Then, this week, a Slack message from my boss: a screenshot of a news story about the TV show Celebrity Traitors. The photograph below the headline was of Alan Carr, a British comedian whose public persona is one of a somewhat hopeless middle-aged nerd. (I'm not editorialising here. His first stand-up show was called Tooth Fairy, in reference to his big teeth, and his second was called Spexy Beast, in reference to his big glasses. He later did another show called Not Again, Alan!, presumably in reference to his general hopelessness.)

"There's another one," my boss had said, when he'd sent the picture, and while to you, reader, it no doubt seems obvious what came next, I had to stare at the picture for a good minute or two before I realised what he was talking about: Alan Carr, in this photograph from Celebrity Traitors, one of the most-watched shows on British television, was also wearing the sodding shacket.

Well, that did it. I can no longer maintain the poetic license. The fact is, I just really don't want to wear the shacket anymore, certainly not anywhere in London, possibly not anywhere in Britain — not anytime soon, anyway. I can probably still convince myself that I look cool in it, rather than like a somewhat hopeless middle-aged nerd trying to cling to my youth, but what's the point? As soon as I step out of the house I might see three other middle-aged men who've managed to convince themselves of the same thing, and the gig'll be up for all of us.

It's sad, really, because it's still a nice shacket. I did get a lot of compliments on it. Maybe I really did look cool. But it no longer feels cool, and while that may well be a silly product of my anxious mind, my anxious mind is where I spend a lot of my spare time, so there's not a lot I can do about it.

On the other hand, though, in the meantime: what a great excuse to buy a new shacket.