tailored tales

It's my sister Paula's birthday night out but how could I not use this picture?
The poseur is my brother Dom at pub chucking out time. This is his response to my comment that he looks like a superhero when he zips that jacket up.

It's not really his leather jacket though.

It was originally a button up affair that my uncle Tom used to wear on his Lambretta in the 60's. It's blanket thick soft leather, the real deal. After a drunk driver killed Tom it passed to my Dad. As did a few other totems; Tom's copy of Robbie Burns poems and his ambitions to be an English Teacher. Dad went so far as to enrol in the same teaching course down south as Tom had but bottled it a few weeks in. Remarkable really as he is dyslexic (diagnosis coming a lifetime later).

Instead Dad and his best pal went hitch hiking round Europe pausing in Norway to stay over with a pen pal until her Dad ever so kindly got them a job on a boat heading to New York. After sailing past the statue of liberty his pal dragged him to see some tramp playing Woody Guthrie in Greenwich Village. Dad bought a few records though and once back in Glasgow impressed my Mum at a party with his Bob Dylan collection. She took her glasses off and by the time she puts them back on and realises what's she's engaged to, Dad has returned to teacher training. This time in Maths. A subject he passionately loves and has been on a lifelong mission to bring to the great unwashed ever since.

Twenty years later he's watching football when number one daughter Larissa asks if she can borrow his jacket. In his dire need to watch Celtic take the treble in their centennial year (had to get that in didn't I?) it's understandable that he failed to detect her dark teenage scheming. The jacket was found a week later re-tailored with a zip. He was like a cowboy forced to give up his horse, but it was thenceforth part her's and as such a frequent visitor to Glasgow's burgeoning house scene in the early nineties instead.

I inherited / nicked it a few years later, along with her student ID and clearasil but it did eventually get used as a biking jacket again when I got my first scooter (a failed bid to make at least one lecture on time).

It got several more European outings when myself and an old boyfriend biked through France, Germany, Czech republic and Poland. He was handy with a sewing machine and lined it with a fleecey lumberjack shirt complete with a denim inside pocket made from an old pair of his jeans. In full padded biking gear I looked like the Michelin man's evil twin and terrified many a rural villager demanding directions for destinations that were hundreds of miles off course.

When the bikes (and the boyfriend) became old news the jacket gathered dust in the lost property office that is my parents attic until last year when Dom reclaimed it. Zipped up it does look cooler on him than it ever did on any of us.

One loose thread (sorry..) was the Norwegian pen pal, who Dad lost touch with. Last year watching footage of the bombing in Oslo he thought he recognised her crossing the screen. With some help on facebook he found her and my parents are currently re-creating his hitch-hiking route into Scandinavia to meet up with her (albeit in considerable more comfort).

In this age of disposable clothing all this sounds far fetched I know, but like no other possessions clothes maketh the (hu)man. It's not just about expressing your tribe or mood, when you lose a favourite t-shirt, or find one you wore the night when something special happened, it can feel like clothes really are our second skin. They accrue imperfections, sensations, memories, histories even. Not sure where the jacket will go next, maybe in ten years my nephew Jamie'll pick it up and think it looks cool, then his kids wear it on their hoverboards... who knows.

There is also the possibility the jacket's reincarnations are a side effect of the original owner's legendary tea-leavery. Apparently he was forever nicking his older brother's clothes. On one occasion an enraged uncle Jack waited up for Tom's return from the dancin' to confront him about stealing his best coat. Tom's reply on being rumbled went down in family legend, "well I needed it to keep your new suit dry...".