Yesterday I attended a funeral, and whenever I do that the conversation turns to clothing, because my clothes are so weirdly smart. "You're looking smart Brian", says everyone.

And here's what we said. We said that it is indeed remarkable how impressive ugly men can look in really good men's clothes. Is their a finer sight in the world than a hideous man, who is normally just one big explosion of visual pollution, decked out in a thousand pounds worth of state-of-the-art Men's Clothes. Ugly women, on the other hand, tend to look ugly whatever they are wearing.

Someone else (a woman, as it happens) claimed that this is because men's clothes don't ever change in basic design. They just get ever more perfect and magnificent. Women's clothes, on the other hand, what with women being so fatally fascinated by clothes, are constantly yanked this way and that by fashion, which doesn't apply to men, and thus women's clothes are in a perpetual state of confusion, and ugly women are in permanent danger of being made to look even more ugly in ways that aren't corrected by spending a thousand pounds but instead made to look even uglier.

I am enough of a man not just to be ignorant of such things and to have no strong opinions about them, but to be downright disapproving of any man who is not so ignorant. But I have weak opinions on this subject, and the above analysis makes sense to me.