The Postbag: How I Converted My Mates
Six letters on talking friends into briefs: a wager that went far too well, a five a side team, a wedding crisis and a son who got there first.
The Postbag: Dispatches from the Locker Room
Six letters from the changing room: the unhurried strut, the towel years, a jammed locker, a dentist at the worst moment and eleven years of Tuesday swims.
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The Postbag is where readers write in and the editor writes back. The correspondents are, let us say, composites. The situations are not.
No room in a man's life generates post like the changing room. Something about tiled walls and a bench and twenty two lockers turns ordinary men into memoirists, and every few weeks a fresh consignment arrives here, some of it typed, some of it written on the back of a leisure centre timetable.
This edition is entirely changing rooms, and we received considerably more than six. Several were disqualified for containing the word "banter", one for being four pages long and entirely about a hairdryer, and one arrived damp, which we took as evidence of authenticity.
The theme that emerged, unasked for, is that almost nothing ever happens. Men write in to describe the moment they were certain the room would turn and look, then report, with a faint air of disappointment, that it did not. We publish these as a public service.
I Executed the Manoeuvre in Full
Sir,
I write to report the successful completion of a project some months in the planning.
Having read a certain field manual on this site with more attention than I care to admit, I resolved that on Thursday last I would cross the changing room at my sports club at what the author calls coat speed, without hurry, without a towel, and without the apologetic hunch I have apparently been performing since 1994.
I packed the bag in reverse order of use. I selected the locker in the first three seconds. I sat down to remove my socks, which I concede is the best advice I have ever been given for nothing. Then I walked.
The result was total. A man near the door continued his account of a boiler service. Another looked directly at me and then, with the indifference of the truly civilised, resumed drying his hair.
It was, in every measurable respect, the finest walk of my adult life.
Gerald Pike, Shrewsbury
The editor writes: Congratulations on a manoeuvre nobody saw, and believe us that this is not a joke at your expense. The whole content of that walk was the absence of a reaction, and the null result is the prize.
Our only correction is to the word "project". Repeat it four more times and it stops being a manoeuvre and becomes Thursday, which is the actual destination The Locker Room Strut: A Field Manual. Be warned that a man who has cracked the walk starts cataloguing everybody else's, and there is a taxonomy waiting in The Nine Men You Meet in Every Changing Room.
Three Years Under a Towel, and Then Not
I am nineteen and I do not really know why I am writing to an underwear website, but here we are.
From about fifteen I got changed inside a towel. All of it, every time, at school and then at the gym. You hold the towel with your teeth at one point, which I assumed everyone worked out privately.
The reason was not my body, or not mainly. I wore white briefs, which my mother bought in packs, and I had decided that being seen in them was the most dangerous outcome available to me in that building. So, the towel, for three years. I once got dressed standing in a puddle rather than move two feet to a dry spot, because moving meant renegotiating the whole arrangement.
In April the towel got left on a radiator at home and I had no choice. I got changed like a normal person, in about ninety seconds, and what I want to report is that I have never felt so stupid in my life, and not because of the briefs. It was the three years.
Name and address supplied, for reasons that will be obvious
The editor writes: Be gentler with the boy who did the towel thing. He was managing a fear with the only tool he had, and he managed it well enough to keep turning up, which is the part that mattered. The clenched teeth manoeuvre, incidentally, is practised in every leisure centre in these islands by men who each believe they invented it.
The long version of what you describe is in A Letter to My Nineteen Year Old Self, Who Wore Boxers, which goes the other way round, and the fear itself gets a hearing in The Locker Room Question: Getting Over the Fear of Being Seen in Briefs. A navy cotton stretch brief reads as deliberate in a way white does not, which is a fact about rooms rather than briefs.
The Cubicle Has Ruined the Boy
Sir or Madam,
Thirty one years teaching physical education, eleven of them at a school with a swimming pool, and I retired the year they put the cubicles in.
I am not one of those men who believes everything was better. The showers were cold and the discipline was, by any modern standard, unserious.
But I will say this about the room we had. It was one room. A hundred and fifty boys a day went through it, and the effect, which nobody planned and nobody would now be permitted to plan, was that within a fortnight of first year nobody was looking at anybody.
Now there are eleven cubicles and a queue. A boy waits eight minutes for a door, and learns that the body is a thing requiring a door. I have watched a fourteen year old wait while a perfectly good empty room sat behind him, and I had nothing to say that would not have got me a letter from a parent.
I wore the same style of brief for the entire thirty one years and never once thought about it. That is my whole point.
R. J. Hollowbrook (Mr), formerly of Ballinasloe
The editor writes: You will find this magazine broadly with you and unable to say so as loudly as you would like, because the cubicles did not arrive out of nowhere and safeguarding practice has moved for reasons that are not silly.
Your point survives the architecture, though. Ease in a changing room cannot be taught by instruction. It is a dose response, and nothing substitutes for the ninety eight visits between the boy's second time and the man's hundredth. The etiquette once absorbed by osmosis now has to be written down, which is what we attempted in The Unwritten Rules of the Communal Changing Room.
On the thirty one years of one style we salute you, and we suspect we know what it was: the classic white y-front brief is still made and still requires no thought at all.
Locker 47
Sir, I write from a position of some calm now but I would like it on record that at twenty past seven on a Wednesday evening I stood in front of locker 47 at my leisure centre wearing nothing but a pair of grey briefs and an already used towel, having put the wristband key into the mechanism only to discover that it had formed its own opinion, and I turned it again with the particular force of a man who believes the problem is enthusiasm, and behind that door were my trousers, my shoes, my car key and the sandwich I had been thinking about since the third length, and in front of it were eight men getting on with their evening with what I can only describe as insulting normality, and the twenty minutes it took the duty manager to find the master key were not spent in humiliation but in something stranger, which is that after four minutes I ran out of embarrassment entirely and stood there, dry, in my briefs, discussing the car park with a retired plumber, and enjoying it.
Duncan Mealy, Kilmarnock
The editor writes: That is one of the finest sentences we have received and we have not cut a comma of it.
You have also stumbled onto the mechanism at the centre of this whole subject. Embarrassment is a stock, not a flow. It runs out. It cannot be sustained for twenty minutes in front of strangers who are supplying none of their own, and what remains is a man in a warm room having a decent conversation. Most men never discover it because they are never trapped long enough. The duty manager did you a favour by being slow.
Two practical notes. Keep the car key on the wristband. And a bag with a dry spare cotton rib brief in it turns such evenings into an anecdote rather than an event, which is the whole argument of The Emergency Pair: A Tribute.
The Room Contained My Dentist
Dear Editor,
I handled this superbly and I want that established at the outset.
Halfway through changing after a five a side match, I became aware that the man two hooks along, likewise mid change, was Mr Fenlon, who has been my dentist since 2009 and who has looked into my open mouth for several cumulative hours while I stared at a ceiling tile with a small crack in it.
The problem is not that he saw me. The problem is that the relationship has a direction. He is above me and slightly behind, in a good chair, wearing a mask, and I am supine and unable to speak. To meet him level, on a bench, both of us pulling socks on, was to feel the structure of my adult life rearranging itself.
I said "alright" in a voice roughly a fifth higher than usual. He said "alright" back. We then both put our shoes on with total concentration, as if shoes were new to us, and he left first.
Composure throughout. Absolute composure.
Name withheld until after my next check up
The editor writes: Your composure is noted and, we would say, more or less real. You said hello. He said hello back. Both of you then returned to your own business and permitted the other man the same, which is two adults independently arriving at good manners.
The direction is the interesting part, and you are right that the room dissolves it. A changing room is the one place in ordinary life where professional standing goes in the locker with everything else, which is why meeting your doctor or your child's headmaster there is so destabilising and why it passes so quickly. Nobody can hold a rank while holding a sock.
Should he raise the subject in the chair, we have prepared you for that too, in So Someone Asked Why You Wear Briefs. Our advice is one syllable and then the ceiling tile.
Eleven Years of Tuesdays
Dear sir,
There is a pool near me, municipal, opened in the 1960s, and I have swum there on Tuesday mornings since 2015. Forty lengths, the same lane, the same lifeguard for the last six of those years, a woman called Ann who has never once had to speak to me.
I have worn the same navy pair the entire time. Not the same style. The same pair. I bought two and one went into a hotel drier in Bilbao in the first year, so the survivor has done the lot alone. It has been to Croatia and into the sea at Lahinch, and it has been rinsed in fresh water after every swim because my father told me to and I never asked why.
Eleven years, and it has gone the colour of a navy thinking about being grey, and the leg elastic has surrendered on one side, and last Tuesday I looked at it on the radiator and understood that we are near the end.
I am not asking for a recommendation. I am aware this is a great deal of feeling to have about a swimming garment.
Tom V., somewhere in Lancashire
The editor writes: A man who has rinsed a garment after every swim for eleven years on his father's instruction deserves to be told why it worked. Chlorine does not stop when you leave the building. It keeps working on elastane in the bag and the boot of the car, and thirty seconds under a cold tap is the single thing separating a pair that lasts a season from a pair that goes to Croatia Chlorine, Salt and Sun: How to Make a Swim Brief Last.
On the end: buy two again. That is the real lesson of Bilbao. A navy swim brief bought in a pair and worn in rotation will see you past 2037, by which point Ann will have retired and you will be the longest serving thing in the building.
The editor's postscript
Six letters and not one of them describes a disaster, which tells you what the changing room actually is once you stop rehearsing it. The postbag stays open. Those of you writing in about training rather than swimming should see The Postbag: Letters from the Gym Floor, and the man who wants to know what happens when the changing room belongs to somebody else entirely will find his people in The Postbag: Away Games, Sofas and Spare Rooms.
Questions people ask
What should you wear to a public swimming pool?
Close fitting swimwear, which means a swim brief, a jammer or a fitted trunk. Many pools in France, Belgium, Portugal and parts of Germany, Spain and Italy require it by rule and will refuse entry in loose board shorts, so check before you travel. In Britain and Ireland loose swim shorts are usually accepted, but they drag in the water and take longer to dry. For swimming lengths, fitted is better on every practical measure.
Is it normal to get changed in front of other men in a changing room?
Yes. Communal changing rooms exist for exactly that and it is ordinary in gyms, pools and sports clubs across Britain, Ireland and Europe. Nobody is paying attention, because everybody present is occupied with their own bag, locker and shoes. If you prefer a towel or a cubicle, use one, since that is also normal and nobody will comment. The discomfort most men feel is about being new to the room rather than the room itself, and it fades with repetition.
What underwear should you wear to the gym?
A close fitting brief, trunk or short boxer brief with flat seams, in a fabric that moves moisture rather than holding it. Cotton blends, merino and technical knits all work. Avoid loose woven boxer shorts, which bunch under gym shorts and stay wet. Seam construction matters more than the style name, since raised seams cause most chafing on longer sessions. Bring a dry pair for afterwards.
How do you get changed at the pool without using a cubicle?
Dry yourself fully first, then dress in order with everything you need stacked on the bench beside you. If you want cover, wrap the towel at the waist and put on the smallest, simplest garment first, since a brief steps on cleanly while anything with long legs catches on damp skin and stalls halfway. Sit down for socks and shoes, and keep sliders in your bag so you are not barefoot on wet communal floors.