Kiwi Kids Books

Here is a picture of our PE HOD in his younger days. You can see that he has spend hours working on his legs.

Earlier this week was the winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere which means that summer is now on the way here, as opposed to two weeks ago when it was moving away from us. This marks an important time in our calendar and for some reason fills me with a little hope. Hope that the worst of the weather has passed and hope that I can get back into my shorts in a few months.

Deciding when to wear your shorts over the winter months is a difficult decision in Tauranga.  For some reason I love wearing shorts, however, I feel that there are some times when they are inappropriate and one of those times is over the winter months. Now when I used to live in Christchurch the line for everyone was simple. No shorts, unless playing sport, between Easter and Labour weekend. Easy. Two important calendar dates detemined  the fashion rules of an entire city. But living in the balmy north the fashion lines are slightly blurred. Yesterday at church I counted 3 men still in shorts which I thought was rather brave considering the mercury was partially frozen around the number 10.

One of the reason for my difficulty is that I work in a school and at that school there is a PE department. These people seem to have a different fashion barometer to the rest of us. It doesn’t matter what the weather, or the time of the year these teachers still wear shorts. It could be minus 15 with a wind chill of -19 and they would still be coming to work in their stubbies, running shoes and stumpy socks. Unfortunately, running parallel with their fetish for shorts is the quality of their legs and I suppose if I had legs like them and tans like theirs I would be wearing shorts all year round. One must wonder what they did at teachers college. Most probably they spent half their time in the gym working the calf muscles and quads and the other half of the time massaging and waxing each others legs. It also wouldn’t surprise me if the PE department spent the majority of their yearly budget on firming cream and fake tan.

My tan is probably the reason why I couldn’t be a PE teacher and is a simple yardstick for when is an appropriate time to bring out your shorts. If you look in the mirror and your legs look like two whitewashed chicken legs it is probably best to jump into your jeans. Conversly if your legs still have a slight brown glow you are probably safe to expose your legs the elements and wider public. Sadly, my summer tan has worn off my now and so their is a real danger that if I do bring out my shorts, somebody somewhere could get hurt or at the very least get the shock of their lives.

So I will continue wearing my long pants over these winter months. Despite my longing to get into my shorts I realise that I do not posses PE teacher legs nor do I want to spend hours grooming them like they probably do. Hopefully as summer approaches the temperature will heat up and I am sure that come October I will be parading my legs like experienced PE teacher.