I love my coat of many colours...

Following a friend’s recommendation for naked work, I spent the bulk of the past ten days in the buff. I can thoroughly recommend it. I have just experienced the best week’s work I have ever done. Inspiration, alongside a fair volume of sweat, sorry, perspiration, has fairly oozed from every pore. Alone, I would like to add. Not in the office. That would be wrong.

Though I suspect it is precisely because I don’t live here that I like it so much, a journey from the smoke to the sticks inspired me. I was house sitting in Twickenham and none but a squirrel and a bunch of birds were privy to my naked secret. Twickenham is a glorious place to be in the summer. There are bikes to be ridden,

drinks to be drunk

and scenery to be seen.

Late last week, I gave in to the pull of the river as the sun hit the highpoint of its day. The town centre was in slow motion as I grabbed an overpriced ice/mango combination from Café Nero, (my latest obsession), and moved towards a bench and the cool green breeze of the Thames.

Three fat pigeons entertained me. There are no skinny pigeons here in Twickenham; there is bread aplenty for everyone. The two larger birds conga’d as fast as their little feet would carry them behind the smaller one, which I took to be a girl. You could just tell that the other two were boys, tongues hanging out, dazed expressions on faces, trousers hanging half down, ok, ok, the sun had gone to my head, but you know what I mean.

A book that has kept me quiet lately sprung to mind. The Penguin Atlas of Human Sexual Behaviour. This nugget hopped off the page.

‘Males must compete to impregnate, while all fertile females are virtually assured of finding a mate. This is why males are mostly larger and, in animal species, more colourful’.

Larger? Maybe, colourful, I don’t think so. Perhaps in the pigeon world there are varying degrees of grey sumptuousness, some shades of which are impossible to resist. Whatever. My mind was already humming with the scorching realization that if nature decrees we ‘birds’ are guaranteed a mate, why on earth do we spend so much time trying to nice ourselves up? What evolutionary cock up has occurred when women are waxing, waning and botoxing their way to acceptability?

Where did we all go wrong? Why hasn’t anyone been informed?

Do the Elle’s, the Vogues, and the Glamour’s of this world not realize that the primping, the preening, the airbrushing and the re-touching, all the effort and the work that goes into making us look like superhuman, smooth, non cellulite ridden, hairless creatures, is all a waste of time?

And the ten year old I encountered in the mixed, (now there’s a rubbish idea), changing rooms at Richmond Swimming Pool a while back? I’d had the temerity to let my underarm hair grow for more than ten minutes, ‘Oi. Love. Shave your armpits won’t you?’ He yelled as he brushed past me in the showers. Now he clearly did not realize, that on the contrary, it was he, not I who needed to be paying more attention to his personal appearance. On a partner scoring scale, that attitude won’t be getting him very far when he’s the fattest pigeon on the block with no hope of finding a girlfriend.

It’s a topsy-turvy old world. At some point, something flipped over its evolutionary axis and dictated, that colour or no colour, the female of the species would fluff feathers, plump plumage and show out in the hope of attracting a mate. Furthermore, at another point, we all bought into it. The second wave of feminism tried to right this wrong when they got involved in bra burning, but it was too late.

‘You’re so good at being a girl’, my friend Katherine once said to me. I was painting my toenails fuscia pink at the time. She’s right, I am. There are few moments I enjoy having to myself more than the ones I spend painting my toenails a pointless shade of pink. It makes me feel good, but sometimes it ticks me off that I find it necessary.

We all collude in this ideal of feminine beauty, but on reflection, I don’t care. I paint my toenails to make me happy and besides, the worm has begun to turn. According to market researchers TNS, British men spent a whopping 569m on deodorants, skincare and other toiletries in the last year. And check out the concealors on this.

Menaji, a new website designed exclusively for male grooming products has adopted the following slogan: ‘Look good = feel good = confidence = success’. Men, it seems, have finally decided they are worth it.

As I sat and wondered how many bird related clichés I could fit into a single sentence, the avian world seemed blissfully unaware of this cat amongst the pigeons. Business had resumed as normal. The birds were still chasing the bees.