Froggy's World - Alms for Oblivion (Weblog)

Never fear, the Manbag is here
15th February, 2007

There was a time when Brisbane men wore dresses. They were called caftans but were frocks by any other name. To wear one was to declare yourself a liberated child of the '70s, freed of the shackles that bound your contemporaries. I can never imagine a man looking good in one, for to my eyes they give the wearer the appearance of a dispossessed Bedouin in search of a camel.
The appropriate fashion accessory for a caftan was a handbag. Not a woman's handbag but one slung over the shoulder, the problem with caftans being that they didn't sport much in the way of pockets. What did one wear under a caftan? It was a question to which I never felt the need to find an answer. The caftan's light burnt briefly on the fashion stage before being extinguished, hopefully forever, but the handbag has lingered on as the manbag.
As I lay in bed last week and pondered the day ahead, my mind was occupied with matters other than manbags. There was the question of my wallet which, on arriving home after a particularly sociable evening, I realised I had lost. My keys to our apartment also were missing, along with a hideously expensive pair of sunglasses. Even by my own impressive standards, the loss of all three items in one evening was a stand-out result. Somehow, through all this, I had managed to retain possession of my mobile phone, thus failing by the slimmest of margins to get the quadrella.
"Here, use my key," said my wife, handing me her apartment key which, mercifully, she always carried with her and without which we would have spent the night curled up on the footpath among the wheelie bins.
   "Is this a ploy to repossess my key and lock me out of the apartment?" she asked.
   "If only it were that simple," I muttered as I viewed the long day stretching ahead.
At this point the mobile phone jangled into life.
   "We've got your wallet," read the text message.
   "Who are these people?" I asked, holding out the phone. "And how did they get my wallet?"
   "They're the couple who drove us home," replied my wife tartly.
   "Oh - that couple," I said. "I wonder if they've got my keys and sunglasses?"
By lunchtime I'd found the keys where I had left them, in the restaurant where we'd dined the previous evening, and by mid-afternoon had tracked down the gentleman who'd found my wallet in the back seat of his car.
   "You're hopeless," said my wife when I called her at work to tell her I had successfully recovered my possessions. "You need a manbag."
   "Never!" I cried. "No Willems male has ever carried a handbag!"
However, it was true I was beginning to tire of leaving possessions scattered throughout the city.
   "That looks...okay," she said as we stood in a corner of David Jones the following Saturday morning. The pause, however, had revealed all.
   "It's not too, um, erm...feminine?" I asked.
   "A bit," she conceded as I quickly tossed the manbag back on the shelf.
After trying and discarding the half-dozen different models in the store, we settled on one she assured me did not make me look ridiculous, feminine or tragic. I paid for it with a credit card and descended to the underground car park where I tried to pay using the same credit card. This proved difficult, as I had walked away and left the card on the David Jones counter. There are some failings against which even a manbag cannot protect you.
I now venture forth each morning with my manbag slung over my shoulder, crammed with my daily essentials. I voiced my fears of losing it to a colleague who offered some helpful advice. "If I were you, I'd superglue it to my arse," he recommended firmly.
The sunglasses? They were in the fridge. Where else?

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