Dressing for a Damp, Cool Autumn Day. . .

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, it's. . . Bertie Wooster?

Nothing like tweed, corduroy, and a pair of vintage 'Phi Bates' brogues by the Bates shoe company on a chilly, wet mid-October afternoon. Besides the cheap IKEA umbrella, the ensemble pictured above includes a tweed hacking jacket by Hart, Schaffner, and Marx (made in the U.S. of A. and featuring a functioning boutonnière hole and leather buttons), the old Phi Bates shoes (still in remarkable condition given their presumed age***), and a hand-printed and unlined wool Ravetz necktie made in Great Britain. . . all worn with a pair of Land's End corduroy pants, a Ralph Lauren oxford cloth button-down collar shirt, and a tweed vest whose precise provenance escapes me at the moment.

My wife remarked that I had a jaunty look going today when she snapped this picture on the front walk of our schloss, and, indeed, jaunty I felt when I dressed this morning. All very fitting since tomorrow (Wedenesday) is P. G. Wodehouse's birthday. Sadly, I lack a gentleman's personal gentleman the caliber of Jeeves, so I'll have to pack and load up the ol' two-seat roadster myself for the trip down to Totleigh Towers later today. Hopefully, neither Madeline Bassett, Honoria Glossop, nor Bobbie Wickham will be lying in wait once I've arrived.

-- Heinz-Ulrich

*** The Bates Footwear company still produces military and police footwear, but civilian shoes have not been manufactured since the early 1960s, making my shoes at least 5o years old, if not older than that.

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