T-Shirt Day

 Radio 3 this morning was getting very excited about Radio  6 Music's T-Shirt Day (not to be confused with International T-Shirt Day or National T-Shirt Day – heaven knows what thrills await us on those dates). This is the kind of thing that tends to happen on the once sedate Radio 3 (what would Piers Burton-Page say?), and I guess it's the price we pay for keeping the network afloat, with enough listeners to justify its existence. It still plays much high-quality music, and heaven knows, it is preferable in every way to Radio 4, at least as default listening. 
  Here in Lichfield, every day is T-Shirt Day: the T-shirt seems to be the preferred apparel of every generation. Most Ts celebrate bands, with a bias in favour of heavy metal – this is the West Midlands, after all – but some sport mottoes or jokes. Alas, I've yet to see a Samuel Johnson T-shirt... The best I've spotted recently I caught sight of from the window of an optician's yesterday, as I was surveying the passing scene (I had no book with me). It was this (though in a more suitable Communist red) and it made me laugh...

The face of Alfred E. Neuman slapped onto the iconic photo of the popular psychopath Che Guevara, it originated in a famous Mad magazine cover ('Viva la Supidity!'). 

  One day, I was walking along Lichfield's Market Street when I saw, approaching me, a large middle-aged man stripped to the waist, showing off a mighty beer belly topped by hairy man breasts. This kind of thing can happen when the weather gets hot. However, as he passed me, I realised that he was in fact wearing a T-shirt – a T-shirt displaying a hyperrealistic image of what no doubt lay beneath. I was at once relieved and, almost, impressed to discover this. For myself, I never wear T-shirts these days (except as a vest substitute), but in my imbecilic youth I owned, among others, a Karl Marx T-shirt – not, alas, adorned with the feature of Alfred E. Neuman.