True liberation is to let yourself go totally and utterly to seed.
Once the preserve of widows and hermits, letting yourself go is now becoming increasingly hip.
And I’m not talking that trance-hippy designer crusty look with the dreadies and the hand-jive.
No. True hostage siege chic, as popularised by Callie and Monique Strydom and latterly by Tom Hanks, is about having a particular tidy, together image and then basically losing interest.
It’s about abandoning your aesthetic and letting your appearance wander unbridled through the back paddock of personal decay for a couple of months.
Callie and Monique had bigger fish to fry than to worry about which side their hair was parted, as indeed do Tom Hanks and myself.
My excuse is that I was promised a make-over by someone in the fashion industry.
Apparently I’m the perfect candidate – a diamond in the rough, upon which the mavens of the fashion world are drooling to unleash their salvage and recovery talents.
The makeover has yet to materialise, which leaves one in a peculiar kind of limbo.
I’ve let myself go quite admirably – grown-out bleach job, half-hearted beard, 1997-vintage wardrobe and a monobrow even Liam Gallagher would blanche at.
Washing, too, has suffered a slide in priority and I’m considering downgrading to thrice-weekly. I can actually smell myself right now, as I write.
And it’s important to smell. In this perfumed, deodorised, disinfected, antiseptic world, it puts you in touch with your animal essence.
Some serial bachelors actually recommend a detergent moritorium as a romantic ploy for male suitors.
After seeing a young lady politely for several dates, they say that if one wants to move the relationship onto the physical plane, pheromoning is the plan.
You stop bathing for several days, then go visit your beloved, unwashed and honing like a truffle hound, but oozing masculinity. Women need to smell you to sense that manly vitality.
I’ve been pheremoning on and off for months now, so masculinity is dripping off me like nightclub sweat.
But I can’t tidy things up, because Murphy’s Law guarantees that the day after I have a new hairdo and a proper shave, the dude Adam will phone me for my makeover.
I’m determined to be a good makeover subject, so I’m hanging tough, or smelly at least.
But seed is not such a bad place to go to, I’ll have you know.
I find I don’t get asked for money by street people that often, mainly because I look like one myself.
Also, when your whole body smells, dogs no longer stick their noses in your crotch when they come scampering up to say hello. Often they just nod howzit, because they can smell you fine from the other side of the room
My hair, too, despite resembling seaweed a little bit, is actually in great condition. Letting my natural oils work their way to the ends, you know. My skin has the greasy sheen of freshly pressed, slightly hairy vinyl.
The contents of my fingernails could feed a window box of geraniums for months and my tooth fur could fill a duvet.
My stubble could strip paint, I look like the Unabomber, but I’m cool with it.
When you can fall no further, there is a certain sweet release one experiences, a moment of clarity.
This is me. Me, the whole me and nothing but me.
No more pretence. No more facade, no more fashion slavery, no more tyranny of cleanliness. No more deodorant.
This is me. Organic me.
A state of seediness is in fact a state of nature. Nature is smelly, dirty, wild and untamed. And we are of nature.
One needs to be naked before one can get dressed. You need to start from your basic state before you can start embellishing it.
I have achieved that state. With my greasy jeans, Cast Away hairstyle and movie director’s stubble, I am Back-to-Nature Boy incarnate. The basic human – unadorned, unprocessed, free of the foibles of modern convention.
This is me. My smell is me.
But my scalp is a little itchy. And my personal space seems to have expanded recently – at about the same rate as my social circle has shrunk.
This is me. But with fewer mates.
So this is me, reaching out to Adam. You’re a fashion dude, I know you’re reading this.
Adam, my buddy. About that makeover ...