The Only Thing That Counts Is Me

Last week, I had to attend Traffic Court to make a plea in mitigation for a colleague's client. My colleague was out of town on other business. The client was prepared to accept that he was indeed speeding, he didn't have a valid driving licence and by virtue thereof he was driving without insurance coverage. Despite all that however, the client wanted to avoid being suspended from driving, if possible.

Being a small matter, I set a junior to work on finding the relevant statutory provisions and case law for me to digest on the morning of the hearing in Court. I became so absorbed in reading and digesting the material my junior had uncovered that I didn't realise I was not wearing a necktie till we were in the cab well on the way to Court with insufficient time to back track to the office and retrieve my tie. Male lawyers can't appear in Court without a tie. It would be a breach of the Practice Directions on dress code.

So I figured I could borrow a tie at the Bar Room, perhaps from another lawyer who might have finished his morning's hearing and was enjoying a cup of coffee with the newspaper before returning to his office. Upon inquiry at the Bar Room, I was directed to ask Albert, the Barman, for a tie. Apparently, I was not the first Advocate to be so absorbed in preparing for his case to forget his tie. Albert is a genial fellow who makes excellent half-boiled eggs, kaya toast and the best (probably the only) honey lemon drink on judicial premises anywhere in the world. Albert is also the central repository of Bar Room rumours on account of his sharp ears and the loud opinionated profession he serves tea to every working day.

Albert opened a drawer full of ties, picked the loudest, ugliest one he could find and handed it to me after reminding me to return it. Of course I would return it! How could I forget a bright yellow object with irritatingly nonsensical patterns hanging right in front of me? Ties serve no useful purpose anyway so I wouldn't want to keep it, especially not that one! This set me wondering how the necktie came about in the first place?

It appears that the modern necktie originated from a military scarf in the 1630s in France. The French King, Louis XIII, had a regiment of Croatian mercenaries who wore unusual and picturesque scarves, called cravats, tied distinctively about their necks. In addition to keeping their necks warm, the colour and material of the scarves made it easy to distinguish the officers (who wore colourful cravats made of fine linen and silk) from the common soldiers (whose cravats were of coarse material). Parisians adopted the style and began to wear cravats themselves tied in a variety of ways.

Eventually, the cravat scarf evolved from something which was useful to utterly useless things like bowties and neckties. Such evolution from usefulness to total uselessness appears to be quite a common theme in human civilization. Examples include the Apollo Space Program, the British Foreign Office and the current Bush Administration.

At least in the case of Apollo, blasting rockets to the Moon was always a beautiful sight despite the fact that nothing worthwhile was achieved after the first few Moon landings. Even the British Foreign Office continued to dressed smartly and spoke with a stiff upper lip accent about World affairs well after they lost Empire and had no role left to play in the World. But as far as neckties (and the Bush Administration) go, most people don't look good in them. In the case of neckties, men tie terribly awful looking knots. In the case of the Bush Administration, they get tied up in terribly awful knots.

There are in fact 4 standard ways of tying a necktie. The most common method is called the Four-in-Hand. It produces a knot which is somewhat rectangular in shape, flat and lopsided. In short, it is ugly to look at. The most beautiful and formal knot is the Windsor. It involves a double loop to give a large full pyramidal shape. But the Windsor knot can look too big if the necktie is of a thick material or the neck is long and thin. So the knot I use is the half-Windsor. It's faster to tie than the full Windosr and it still gives a nice pyramidal shape.

The half-Windsor has the added feature that when the short end is pulled out of the knot, you only need to tug the long end for the whole knot to unravel completely into a straight line. This makes the half-Windsor the most efficient knot for putting the necktie to its true use - as rope for bondage sex. One necktie of course only ties one hand to the bedpost so women should be wary of dates showing up wearing one tie and carrying another in the pocket. Men wearing neckties should be wary of other men who also wear neckties.

The last common method of tying a necktie is called the the Pratt knot (also known as the Shelby knot). It has the unusual feature of showing the reverse side of the short end of the tie. To some, this might symbolize a dashing personality not afraid to break with tradition but it doesn't work for me because the reverse side of the short end of my neckties often say "Made in China".

Not being satisfied with only 4 standard ways of tying a necktie, 2 researchers from Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory (Thomas Fink and Yong Mao) used mathematical modelling to conclusively prove that it is possible to tie 85 different knots with a conventional necktie. Why Messrs. Fink & Yong would undertake such a study has always been a mystery to me. I imagine that having finished their Doctoral Dissertations, they decided that fields such as rocket science and astro-physics were not as worthwhile a pursuit as the epic undertaking to discover how many ways a necktie could be knotted. Frankly, I would like to meet the person or organisation who granted them the funds to conduct their study. I may be able to persuade those people to grant me the funds to play every golf course in the world and blog about them.

According to Messrs. Fink & Yong, in addition to the 4 well-known knots, they discovered that 6 other knots produced aesthetically pleasing results. To the best of my research however, I can find no evidence that the 6 new knots proposed by Messrs. Fink & Yong have been adopted by the public at large. I suspect this may be because the public treats the average mathematician's opinion of "aesthetically pleasing", especially in the field of fashion sense, with a certain amount of skepticism.

All those thoughts were going through my head on the taxi ride back to the office after Traffic Court that morning when I suddenly caught my reflection in the mirror and realised I had forgotten to return Albert the tie I had borrowed. Amazing how one can forget an ugly yellow useless thing hanging around one's neck like that.