I see that aviator jackets are back. Specifically, fleece-lined bomber jackets, the sort of thing a chap would wear to climb into his Lancaster or B17 before popping over the channel to drop a bit of payback on of Mr Hitler's minions. Apparently, it's because of Masters of the Air.
Yes, this is exactly what I looked like...
Fair enough. I get it, I really do. I once had a perfect specimen of the form, bought with my earliest paychecks from Defence when I took my graduate job there back in the early 1980s.
I couldn't afford my fleece-lined bomber jacket. But I wanted it so much that I was willing to go without food and/or shelter. Thus, I placed it within my possession.
For years I thought of it as my adventure jacket. Whenever I would travel on some freelance mission, the jacket went with me, even though, to be honest, it was completely inappropriate for the climate and the culture. But damn it, I just didn't care. I had paid a lot of good folding money for that thing, and I was going to wear the hell out of it.
It survived the side-eyes and ill-intentions of a number of girlfriends over the years, all of whom schemed and connived to separate me from it. It moved from share house to share house, from state to state, and eventually travelled around the world a couple of times. We did have adventures together, that jacket and I.
You must sense a sad, somewhat elegiac tone. I'm afraid it appears that my favourite adventure jacket did not survive married life. I went looking for it after seeing that piece in The Graun. In that strange, mysterious way that all of my Hawaiian shirts and Dunlop Volleys and King Gee shorts, which had always been with me, were suddenly not, I find myself without my bomber jacket just as it becomes acceptable to wear one again.
This makes me very sad, even though if I did wear it I would probably die, because it really was designed to keep you warm at 20,000 feet in an uninsulated metal tube.