THE SUIT

I had a friend once, who wore his bar-mitzvah suit to a job interview when he was thirty-five. (He got the job, too – though whether it was one he really wanted is another story, which I’m not going to tell...)

As with any fact, there are many conclusions you can draw from this particular piece of information. He may have been very big for his age at thirteen. He may have been very small for his age at thirty-five. Or it may have been something to do with the suit. Perhaps it was made from such fine material that it wouldn’t show its age, or very generously cut, so that he would grow into it.

Or perhaps there’s something more metaphysical about suits in general – something that’s partly in the suit and partly in our attitude to it. Didn’t he need another suit during that double decade? Or didn’t he want one?

When, after all, do you wear a suit? For your bar-mitzvah, clearly – therefore, for all the other important and relatively singular events of life: birth, marriage, death. Well, I know from my own experience that the one in the middle isn’t necessarily singular, and while the suit that I am given to understand I wore on my birth day was clearly my birthday suit, it obviously doesn’t come into the same category as the other garments I’m discussing. Moreover, the wearing of a suit is a requirement not only for the central figure in these ceremonies, but also for the other participants, who indicate thereby their respect for the central figure and/or their reverence for the ceremony itself. The suit is, in some sense, a sacred vestment.

Well, that's the theory, anyway. But it's clearly undermined by those people who wear it as an everyday uniform.

Now, uniforms I understand. They have two very clear purposes. One is to tell you who's on your side and who isn't, as in schools and armies; and the other is to give visible expression to the alleged degree of authority which the uniform-wearer possesses. In some contexts, that can be equated to the "dazzle-factor": the more the braid, the higher the grade. But that obviously doesn't work in a posh hotel, for example, where the commissionaire, however much power and influence he may wield in the timely provision of mini-cabs and mini-skirts, clearly doesn't outrank the soberly suited manager, who, in his turn, has to defer to the owner, who may, on occasion, choose to emphasise his inherent authority by deliberate informality of dress - or even the lack of it: I can conceive of Nicky Hilton or one of the Fortes sacking an underling without even bothering to climb out of their penthouse swimming-pool, let alone covering their Speedo trunks with an Armani robe.

They can afford to deliberately flout the dress code, because they're above it. One law for the rich, and another for the suit. That, after all, is what the middle managers are called behind their backs: "it's all right with me, but it won't please the suits." In order to put on a suit, you must first remove your humanity. Otherwise, there may be tell-tale bulges – like a heart.

Do I really believe this? Or am I just playing devil's advocate - a lawyer pleading the case of the client who pays him best? Or pleading the case that he knows will annoy the judge the most, in the hope that if the bench can't beat him, he will be allowed to join it?

I think my friend interpreted the suit as a uniform, and knew for a fact that he wasn't on the same side as anybody who wore one. It was honesty, rather than an act of deliberate defiance, that kept him suitless all those years. The interview was espionage and not capitulation. (Don't forget that a mole is known as "the little gentleman in black velvet" – though the Jacobites had their own reasons for that circumlocution.)

I can remember my own first suit, though it wasn't for anything as special and sacred as confirmation, first communion or bar-mitzvah. After all, going to university has nothing to do with the acquisition of spiritual maturity or the attainment of manhood. I'd always looked quite good in blazer and flannels, but after you've left school you can't be the member of anything decently neutral any more: the badge on the pocket will show where you're coming from, and not just where you come from.

It was a time of transition. They'd just stopped making undergraduates wear gowns at night, so they could distinguish them from "townies" if there was trouble, but they still insisted on gowns in the dining hall - at least at the formal third sitting for dinner when the dons dined – wearing a gown while you lined up cafeteria-style to carry your own food and cutlery to an unlaid place at a scrubbed deal table was clearly too empty a piece of ceremony to be worth preserving. But the ornamental and the useful were combined later on, when the gown provided protection from the soup the waiters spilled as they dispensed over-filled bowls from over-filled trays, like third-rate Russian provincial circus-performers.

I think we were supposed to wear gowns to lectures. We took them, for the first term at least, just in case, but no one made us put them on, and the same went for exams – we wore them, but it was so hot they let us take them off. The gown was supposed to be the outward and visible sign of inward and invisible intellectual concentration, which would then become visible on the paper in front of us.

You could still just about get away with wearing a suit to a party. It showed you'd "made an effort". It indicated respect for the occasion and its givers.

The observant among you will have noticed that so far I have talked exclusively about men. Partly that reflects my own experience of life up to that point, an all-boys' grammar school followed by Cambridge. But it also reflects the great and vital distinction between the sexes: women have no pockets.

It was a pocket that taught me the real meaning of postponed gratification. I'd worn my suit to a party, and been offered a liqueur chocolate or an after-dinner mint – something, at any rate, that didn't go at all with what I was drinking at that moment, whether it was Lutomer Riesling with the same sickly-sweet flavour of vomit on the way down as the way up, or a pre-Trade-Descriptions-Act claret that tangibly loosened your fillings, or that proprietary Spanish blend one was always tempted to call Corroda. Anyway, some months later, without particularly looking for it, I found the pleasure I had chosen not to enjoy that night, and it was just a sticky mess.

That's where your past catches up with you: in your pockets. Just ask Bilbo Baggins. And that's where my story is about to take me.

While I still taught at university, I shunned suits – both the people and the garments. If I turned up to work wearing one – because I was going on to a funeral, or a wedding, or a christening afterwards – the students all wished me good luck at my interview. As time went by, and going to university became more about getting a good job than getting a good education, I think they thought of me less as a permanent adolescent and more as a permanent caterpillar, whereas they were going to metamorphose into gorgeously suited butterflies.

When I took the early retirement money and ran, and started supply teaching, I found to my amazement that all the teachers were wearing suits. No more leather elbow patches and cords and baggy sweaters, but proper, smart suits. It was the uniform, to show which side you were on. To maintain standards. You couldn't actually stop the little gits swearing, or teach them anything like true respect for the real values of life, but you could sure as hell insist they tied their ties properly and didn't come to school wearing trainers. I don't actually believe that the outward and visible sign produces the inward and invisible reality, nor that Reebok is the God of Teenage Rebellion and Lavatorial Graffiti, but I was only being paid for my physical presence between half-past eight and three, so I kept my thoughts to myself, and went to the charity shops.

The best of the suits I eventually got was of aristocratic provenance - I won't tell you the name, and not even which town, because that would give it away, but it fitted as well as only a costume ever does. And that was how I reconciled myself to wearing the enemy's uniform: I was playing a part. And when I took it off, I was myself again.

It was a beautiful suit, and did duty for several formal occasions, including funerals which affected me very deeply, moderately deeply, and not particularly deeply at all. On each occasion, I folded the service sheet and popped it into my pocket. Sometimes I would pencil the address, the phone number, or the e-mail of a long-lost friend on the back of it, and only then would I bother to seek it out afterwards, usually transcribing the necessary information somewhere more permanent, and replacing the folded A4 sheet in the pocket of the suit from which it had come.

Then, one day, I was in the train on my way to another funeral when I thought I'd better check the precise address of the church, and the gathering-place afterwards, and compare it with my A-Z, just in case it made more sense to get out an intermediate station – I always feel the deep discrepancies between station-names and district names in the London suburbs were deliberately introduced as a device to foil possible German invaders and in the euphoria of VE day people who'd got used to them during the six years of war simply forgot to change them back.

I fumbled around in the paper jungle of my pockets (incident report forms, lists of classes I was supposed to be covering, old service sheets) and picked out what felt the freshest, even if it was an A5 folded in half. The name of the church seemed unfamiliar, which wasn't surprising, because, as I read on, I saw that it wasn't in the London suburbs at all. Nonetheless, there was a surprise waiting for me: the date. Not just the day, not just the month, but the year. It said 2005.

You don't scream in trains. It's not good manners. I just sat and looked at the piece of paper. I knew when and where the funeral would be – it certainly wasn't the one I thought I was supposed to be going to – but fortunately the name of the deceased was on the underside of the folded piece of paper. I chose not to look. Instead, very carefully, I felt for an empty pocket in my suit, found one (the wallet pocket, significantly enough) and put the piece of paper in there, trembling slightly.

I was still short of the information I required, though. And for someone like me, that's a very bad position to be in. I started breathing deeply to calm myself down, and before I began to hyperventilate I tried another lucky dip. I investigated the paper carefully with my hands before daring to look at it. As usual, A4 folded to A5 and then folded across again. I pulled it out and looked. The funeral organiser had used a different format this time. The name of the deceased came first. Date and location were an elementary origami movement away. The name was familiar enough. It was the friend who'd rung me the previous evening, to ask if I was going to be at the funeral to which the train was even now conveying me.

You know what I did. And I hope you'd have done the same. And as the attendant came by with the drinks trolley, I made his day by ordering a quadruple g and a single t. Then, under the table at which I was sitting, I sifted through the contents of all my pockets, feeling for railway tickets, which sometimes come in pairs, one out, one back, and sometimes singly, if they're a Travelcard. After ten minutes, I had a large pile of paper, which I squashed into my wallet pocket, and nine small tickets. Using my hands as a shield, I concentrated on the area containing the date. Knowing where I was to have an appointment with destiny would have been too great a clue. One Travelcard had the same date as the newspaper the man on the other side of the carriage was reading. There was a matching pair from the near future. The rest were from the past. The Travelcard I kept in my hand, with the A-Z. The rest went into my wallet-pocket - and none too soon, because just then we arrived at the station which was nominally my destination (we can continue the nominalist/realist debate on another occasion).

I was still spluttering on the end of the gin as I stood on the platform and looked about me. I hope my friend smelt it on my breath – it would have given him some explanation for my state and my behaviour. Which friend? Oh – the one who'd rung me the night before. The one who, I knew, was going to die – as, indeed, we all are, sooner or later. He said he'd worked out which train I'd have to come by, and as his had got in a few minutes before, he'd just hung around, on the off-chance...

"You look terrible," he said. "Seen a ghost?"

I coughed some more gin-fumes over him.

"And the suit – ! I mean, it's fine, but what have you got stuffed into your pocket? You're not a pistol-packing secret service agent, are you?"

"No," I said, striding to the rubbish bin and unburdening myself. "I just had some things to sort out. There are no secrets about me at all."

So we went off and had a good time at the funeral – which is, after all, what funerals are for: to remind the living that it's nice to be that way.

And the suit? Well, it was far too nice to destroy, so I put it back into circulation. Pinstripe. Double-breasted. Cut wonderfully high in the waist. Good for barmitzvahs, etcetera, etcetera - just don't look in the pockets. Excellent condition. There's plenty of life in the old suit yet - which means, I suppose, by the same token, plenty of death.

9am to 7pm December 5th 2002