I woke up last Saturday with the worst kind of hangover. A mild one. The problem with a ‘milder’ is that it’s strong enough to skew your judgement but not so strong that you can’t get off your arse and buy something crazy in town. On top of that, it gives you enough false confidence to say “ok, I’m 43, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t buy a pair of low-cut skinny jeans that everybody seems to wear these days.” Which is what I did last Saturday.
Worse again, I did it in TK Maxx. TK Maxx is a brilliant place to get last season’s jeans at half-price but I always buy two pairs when I’m in there. So if you make a mistake, it’s doubled. So now I have two pairs of low-cut skinny jeans.
Not that it’s a mistake. They look well and it’s nice to have a pair of jeans cosy up to me again after years of baggy boot-cut looseness. There’s just one problem. Peeing in public.
Women wrongly assume that men love the bonhomie of the gent’s toilet. We don’t. It involves standing against a wall with a bunch of strangers, himself in hand. That makes us nervous. We want to get the job done quickly and without fuss.
Loose-fitting jeans work here because you can open the fly and produce the goods in one fluid movement as you approached the urinal. It’s a thing of beauty when done properly. I’d forgotten that it doesn’t work like that in tight jeans. I got a stark reminder when I wore my new pair on Sunday.
I don’t want to go into too much detail, but lets just say I managed to get the fly-buttons open on the way to the toilet and then nothing. There was no way I could have got any further without doing permanent damage and looking like Mr. Bean. These aren’t the drainpipes of my youth, where you could still work something out.
The low cut and tight fit means the fly on today’s jeans is way too short for the job at hand. It’s just for decoration.
Luckily I learned this at home and had a few work-around options. But can you imagine the embarrassment if I walked up to a public urinal and had what showjumpers call a refusal. That’s a long and awkward retreat over to the cubicles. When I told my wife about this she asked why a man couldn’t just pull his pants down a little to complete the job.
No. Whereas mooning the entire pub is acceptable and possibly hilarious, once you’re inside the gents, the pants stay up. That’s men for you. The only time you are allowed go near the top button of the jeans is in a cubicle or perhaps to tuck in your shirt and even that’s considered a bit flashy.
The point here is if the fly on a man’s jeans are reduced to mere decoration, then so are the urinals. This means that for the first time in our lives, we can expect to spend a few minutes in the jacks queuing for a cubicle. This is the greatest change in Irish nights out since the women were left into the pubs.
Women don’t get this. Their trips to the toilet can last for well over an hour. It’s why they bring their handbag and at least one friend. Something could come up and it would have to be talked about there and then. Or they might meet a girl they knew in school. That’s a one hour conversation, minimum.
They don’t realise that a man will only spend time in the toilet when he has business in there. Once you have put your barely washed hands under the dryer for two seconds, you walk out. It doesn’t matter if you’re mid-sentence with your long lost pal from primary school, you must leave. Hanging around is creepy and your pint is going warm.
But now, in this new age of low-cut tight jeans, hanging around will be the norm. That means a lot of us are going to have to work hard on our Jacks Chat.
The kind of stuff that passes for conversation while standing at the urinal – “the pints are good tonight” or “jaysus lads, I was bursting” – just sounds lame when you have to eyeball some randomer in the queue. It’s not like we can learn from the women here, because if you think that an Irish man will say to his friend “do you want to come to the jacks with me”, then think again.
Maybe my wife was right. If we’re going to wear skinny jeans, then we should be allowed to pull them down for a quick stint at the urinal. As long as I don’t have to be the first to try it.
