Sporting Cardigans 2

For the second in my sporting cardigans mini series I'm going to take a brief look at the bowls cardigan. That's bowls, not bowling; the British game of marbles played by elderly gentlemen (and some ladies) on billiard-table smooth lawns or indoors. I know little about the game itself, but it's enthusiasts appear to be old and competitive. A look at their websites reveals this latter trait, they seem obsessed with competing and winning. A secondary, but also important concern seems to be with the sartorial; competing and being well dressed seem to go hand in hand.

In a sense this is understandable. Some people are just competitive and when the body starts to exhibit those failures and limitations which flesh is heir to, a more sedate outlet for this naked aggression is likely to be sought. Bowls would appear to be such an outlet.

I illustrate my piece with a picture of a Balmoral  bowls cardigan, one I bought on ebay. I have another which I bought from a bowls outfitter on Scotland. They are made of a dense and thick acrylic with five 2-hole buttons. They appear to be generously sized probably to enable their increasingly portly wearers to claim to be medium when they're in fact, how to put this politely... er... not. They are always white, the cardigans and their wearers. Being white they show stains, which in my experience don't wash out too well, so real enthusiasts need to watch where they're putting their gentleman's relish.

I have done an extensive search today and discovered that they are no longer available, can't find the men's version anywhere. We may have seen the end of an era.

Not a word of the following is true.

I used to help out at the local bowls club, helping the elderly gentlemen in their clubhouse. They used to get changed into their whites before matches and most of them wore the bowls cardigans. Some of them used to encourage me to help with their cardigan buttons and one of them, a particularly portly gent, name of Flowers took a particular interest in me.

I didn't think much to it. He was a married man and I wasn't really much of a gerontophile, apart from wanting to help portly elderly gents with their cardigans at the weekend. This particular Sunday he had made sure he pressed his ample tummy against me as I helped him on with his cardigan and I must confess I copped a feel just to feel how prominent and curvaceous it was. This appeared not to be lost on him, as the match proceeded he glanced in my direction on several occasions.

As with all bowls matches, what seemed like hours of tedium were leavened with moments of sheer monotony to the extent that it would not be hard to persuade oneself that these players out there on the lawn had started the game as much younger men. At last it finished and all retired to the clubhouse to boast of their achievements and remove their cardigans, a task with which I was enthusiastic to help.

I was to be thwarted in my desire to play with a lot of cardigans by Mr. Flowers's insistence that I help him and only him, and that interrupted by his insistence that he give me a lift home in his car. He was most forceful and I soon found myself in the passenger seat of his car. Large as it was, and commodious as the interior was, Mr. Flowers was a tight squeeze behind the wheel, his embonpoint  having been emphasised by his seated position. So enthusiastic had he been earlier to leave the clubhouse with me in tow that he still wore the sporting cardigan, now somewhat distended by his posture.

We set off, not in the direction of my place but his. He told me during the brief journey that his wife was away and that she didn't understand him anyway. At this point he put his hand on my knee. We eventually arrived at his house and he invited me in. By this time I was intoxicated by the sight of cardigan restraining ample tummy and followed him.

He closed the front door and bade me wait in the hall while he disappeared upstairs, he came down moments later and invited me to follow him upstairs. Bereft of all other garments he was still wearing the cardigan.

I shan't bore you with the details. Suffice to say he had an old fashioned view of sex, gentleman on top and very much in charge. I remember the sheer weight of him compressing me and the vigour with which he had to fuck to reach orgasm. I didn't have one and wasn't invited to have one, I suspect he was unused to his sexual partners having such things.

He appeared less frequently at the bowls club after that and eventually I heard through the other members that he had died of a heart attack. One of his closer friends brought me a cardigan. It had belonged to Mr. Flowers. The friend, who had helped his wife clear out some things, thought I might like it.

Like I said, they stain easily, and it doesn't wash out.

I took a photograph of Mr. Flowers on my phone that day. I still have it but those prudes at google have deemed it unsuitable so I've had to remove it.

Sporting Cardigans

Golf

I am particularly fond of golf cardigans, specifically Arnold Palmer golf cardigans. Personally designed by Arnold Palmer it says on the label. Yeah, sure I can believe a man who was exceptionally good at golf was also an expert on fabrics and garment manufacture. In another sphere, anyone interested in cycling will know many of the good framesets bear the names of past champions in the sport. Eddie Merckx, for example. Who would have guessed that such a champion was good at welding too?

So my point is that I doubt Mr. Palmer's input went much beyond make it a bit baggy in the upper body and have ample sleeves so I can take a good swing. In fact he probably just took the money in exchange for the use of his name and left it to Robert Bruce, the manufacturer to do the rest.

The AP cardigan was not the only card made by the above mentioned company, they made others. The examples I have share a design characteristic which may have been unique to the brand, a curled over edge to the material achieved by fine stitching pulling the edge inwards. This may have been unique to them; I've not seen it elsewhere.

The AP cardigans were available in acrylic, wool, and alpaca and thus available to a wide market. They seemed to be mostly marketed in the sixties and seventies and about ten years ago were plentiful on EBay. There's fewer of them about these days so I suspect they'll soon be gone.

A factor which drew me to them is that most of them had two-hole buttons. They later went to four hole and incorporated the AP emblem on the chest. Before then, the emblem, a golf umbrella was embossed on the buttons, except when it wasn't. I have AP cardigans whose buttons match the general pattern exactly except for the embossed emblem, no idea what was going on there at all. If anyone knows let me know.

There was another brand of golf cardigan, endorsed by Nick Faldo. If I recall correctly they were sleeveless and had a wide v at the bottom of the front, thus not buttoning all the way down; never liked 'em.

But Arnold Palmer cardigans I do like.

 Here's one with the plain buttons.

Now imagine a modern take on the golf card, we could have a Tiger Woods golf cardigan.Perhaps several different models, the "shagger" five button sleeveless and the "super shagger" six button with sleeves. The heterosexual dimension is slightly off putting but to coin a cardigan-related term, the idea has buttons.

On another topic, but one I've banged on about before, here's another interesting take on the poppers issue

more on poppers 

Thanks for reading I'll post again soon.

More on poppers

Here's a little adendum to my last post. There's a good discussion of the poppers situation here
link.

I've added a hit counter to this blog which has revealed that astonishingly I am not the only visitor!

Poppers

I am sure I'm not alone in noticing the decline in the quality of poppers; the current variety are shite. It seems the old formulation is now illegal within the EU, something to do with rats getting cancer if they're immersed in the stuff for half their lives.

As a complete screaming pervert I rather relied on the old amyl nitrite to fire up the imagination and make almost anything into a turn-on. I have a theory that poppers promote the release of a hormone, hitherto unknown to science (and because you cant get the real stuff anymore, likely to remain that way), preposterone which makes even the most preposterous things seem sexy. This "theory" remains in the realms of idle speculation; my chance of a Nobel prize having been scuppered by a piece of unimaginative legislation preventing further legitimate experimentation.

All is not lost; there are brands out there that give nearly the rush of the old stuff. These are the large bottle brands, Iron Horse and similar but I suspect they just succeed because the larger diameter neck on the bottle permits a bigger dose.

More hope, too, emerges from the fact that it is only illegal to sell the old formula stuff, not to possess it or even manufacture it. The chemistry is simple, the procedure not too complicated and the chemicals easy to get in principal. My reservation is that getting these chemicals will arouse suspicion and I think any nitrate chemical purchases will flag something dodgy to various authorities. Protesting that you use the stuff to fuel a weird fetish will probably only attract even more unwelcome scrutiny; in short you're fucked.

Regular readers (yeah, just me...) will have noticed that I've not posted for a while. This is because of the turmoil produced by the refurbishment of Cardigan Towers. It's going well and I'll post some pictures at some stage.

You can see a vid of me wearing this at


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCb6FYlOcyY



Will post more soon, do look in again.

Yearbook and Memory

You’ll all be familiar with the yearbook, though if you’re a Brit like me probably not too familiar. If I get this hopelessly wrong perhaps someone will be kind enough to tell me. My understanding is that each year through school a year group publishes a book with pictures of all the year’s members and a little bit of information about each, achievements, aspirations and so forth.

Some years ago I heard a short story about gawkers at road accidents, those people who gather round at such events. Their purpose is to inhibit the approach of a doctor, hence the expression “let me through I’m a doctor”. If these people weren’t there the doctor would have unrestricted access to the injured party and no reason to call out and announce his or her  status. Thus the gawkers have a function in enabling medical help to identify itself; that they may delay access is a small price to pay for the essential identification function.

None of this was in the short story, that concerned itself with an observation that all gawkers are in fact the same people, at all locations and all times. The suggestion was that there is a group of people who are forced to attend road accidents as a kind of curse (as opposed to paramedics, for whom it is a job). This was meant to sound rather sinister and mysterious in precisely the way my description has failed to convey.

What has this to do with yearbooks or indeed cardigans, which have gone three paragraphs without a mention? Well it is my contention that there was a cardigan wearer in all years at all schools and they can be tracked through yearbooks. Here in the UK obviously not, we don’t have yearbooks but we do have cardigans, there’s just no pictorial record of them at school. There was one in the year below me at my school and as far as I could tell at the time he thrust his cardigan at me in a provocative manner more than once; let’s hope he’s still wearing one.

Anyway, my illustration this week is a mock up of what might be lurking in yearbooks and in my case is lurking in my memory.

TV Show

My apologies to anyone who reads this regularly, but I missed a week. I've been having work done at Cardigan Towers and simply forgot amid the chaos.


The following could only happen in a universe where HIV never happened, it's pure fantasy.

Here's a pitch for a television show, might find a late slot on a porno cable channel or a gay cable channel if such exist. We'll use the working title "That Cardigan Show", it'll be studio based with an audience, have discussions, guests and much filth. There will be pre- filmed inserts of cardigan related fun outside the studio, made by the presenters. These may and probably will show explicit sex.

So, who to present it? I think we need two presenters, one obviously Dead Butch, the other Less So. The former, with a view to a potentially large market might be American; in fact he will be. He'll be circumcised too, and a provocative advocate for it. That will give us the basis for some good banter between the presenters. The Less So presenter will clearly be what Dead Butch would call a catcher.

They'll wear cardigans and posing pouches only and appear before an invited audience who will be required all to wear cardigans. An ongoing thread in the show will be the 'pot-o-spooge', being a tub of gentleman's relish provided by the studio audience and sent in by the audience at home. There could be an insert each week visiting a bunch of cardigan guys who have volunteered to contribute and we'll be able to see what they get up to in the production of that contribution, which is added to the pot back in the studio.

A member of the audience may be interviewed about some aspect of cardigan fetishism and as a reward have a large dollop from the pot splattered on his cardigan, in the 'cardigan custard' spot. Another volunteer from the audience may get the chance to drink from the pot through a straw as a reward for answering correctly some cardigan related questions in a 'mastermind' setting. At the end of the series the remaining spooge could be used to dunk a whole cardigan or someone could drink it. Perhaps a spooge gun could be created and a golden shot style spooge the cardigan target game could be arranged. 'Bernie, the spooge' could become a catchphrase.

Another studio item might be 'beat the cock' a race to orgasm between audience volunteers along the lines of the biscuit game.

The inserts can have our hosts visiting places of cardigan interest. Butch would ideally be a porn star and poster-boy for cardigan wearers. Each week an audience member who has submitted a photograph of his bedroom adorned with a poster of Butch will receive a 'surprise' visit and get a seriously good seeing to. Butch would also be on the road in the ‘cardivan’ encouraging cardigan wearing and promoting circumcision. We might even get a volunteer for circumcision and follow him through the process. There could be a visit to America where Butch dons a letter cardigan and gives the boy cheerleaders something to celebrate.

Less So can visit places like a dildo factory where he will invariably become the unsuspecting victim of hilarious consequences, usually involving penetration, large sizes and his anus. To this end there may be the occasional involvement of a football or rugby team. A highlight of the series could be a visit to an army barracks. A farm visit or a trip to a bottling plant might easily see Less So end up in casualty having to explain how 'that' got up there. The other participants in these items will be in the audience and come down to be presented in their custard besmirched cardigans. Less So could be involved in ‘dilation challenge’ where he vies with members of the audience to accommodate large and unusual objects with Butch on hand to loosen them up and make sure the objects go right in.

An element of the programme could be given over to portly, elderly cardigan wearers and perhaps visits to golf clubs or bowling greens where such gentlemen wear cardigans. Both presenters could be involved in this segment, giving and receiving.

The core value in the show will not be simple bawdiness but sheer filth, lots of cardigans, unbuttoning and much splattering of sperm both bottled and draught. The after-show party will be something else, and as producer, I’ll be there every week.

The closing credits will see our presenters taking a champagne bottle out of an ice bucket, we see it's labelled Spooge and indeed that's what it contains. They each pour a small quantity into an old fashioned champagne glass, toast (ding of glasses), take a sip and hen pour the rest down their cardigans.

A caption comes on saying "All the spooge used in this programme is genuine gentleman's discharge". They pour another glass and drink deeply.

I've a feeling Simon Cowell will not be interested in this format.

Further to my previous....

Well, it happened. I'm having some work done at Cardigan Towers and have had to show decorators and sundry tradesman around the place making massive and unreasonable demands (there's no point living in a place that's painted the wrong colour!). Naturally, the poster came down, as did a couple of adornments on the base of my bed. What I completely forgot about was a picture standing on the mantelpiece looking like the illustration below; I'm so used to it I simply don't see it any more. For regular readers of this blog (ha ha!) It'll be a somewhat familiar image, referred to elsewhere as a cracking cardigan.  It's about 6cm x 4cm and looks like a framed photograph.

So, people have been in and out to measure stuff and to bleed radiators and various other tasks and have naturally said nothing; they are after all British. Except for the plumbers, they're Polish, don't know how cardigans go down in that neck of the woods, but they know I'm British so probably expect a certain level of weirdness. I can't even say I was caused any embarrassment as I was unaware of it at the time.

The other upshot of this getting stuff done business is having to pack things up to clear rooms for various artisans to ply their trades. This has meant a chunk of the cardigan collection has had to be packed away in black bags and piled up out of the way. Thus my rack of assorted cards (see the picture with my last post) is no longer easily available and my choice is limited if I'm not going to rummage through bags. I am a fetishist, I miss my cardigan collection. I have acesss to only a few specimens and I'm missing them. Added to that the weather is getting warmer by the day and my excuse to wear them when I go out is declining. No, please, no sympathy, it's my own fault (well, not the weather obviously) and I must live with the consequences of my decisions. Perhaps next week I'll have something more cheerfull to relate.