Short of Choice

If you were to look at me, probably the last thing you would think is "He is fit", either in the literal or colloquial sense.

But I try.  I play badminton a couple of times a week and I walk most days.  I even play tennis occasionally and as SWMBO and I are about to depart on a holiday I thought a new pair of tennis shorts might be a sound investment of a small portion of our life savings.

So I strolled into Sports Direct.  For those of you not fortunate to live in the UK, Sports Direct is a chain of warehouse-sized shops that allegedly sells sports goods.  I say allegedly because there is a vast amount of stuff there that looks more like cheap "fashion" or sports posing paraphernalia, such as onesies, dressing gowns, "pet store", accessories and jewellery.

Some people believe that Sports Direct is the employer of last resort for the gormless, but this would be wrong.  You do get very few graduates working there but if you trouble to speak to the employees, many of them are perfectly capable of constructing a coherent sentence and, indeed, showing you where in this vast cavern the item you want is.  Which is all you really want.

However ...

Having spent 20 minutes looking for tennis shorts I gave up and asked one of the staff.  She had the gleam of intelligence in her eyes but didn't know where tennis shorts were.  So she asked her manager who said they didn't have any but "we will be getting more in around Wimbledon time".

Wimbledon time?!?!?  That's four months away.  What do tennis (and badminton and squash) players do in the mean time?

So I went online, where you can buy everything.

Everything except for mid-size tennis shorts, it appears.  Even online Sports Direct seems to only have Extra Large tennis shorts.  Nor are they alone.  Amazon only stocks Tiny or XXL (add more Xs to  taste).

It's clear we have a problem.

The fatties aren't doing any exercise except for a week or so after Wimbledon and their unwanted shorts are clogging up warehouses Hither and Yon, not to mention Far and Wide.

So, come on you couch potatoes.  Even if you don't plan to use them, go and buy yourselves a pair of tennis shorts  so that retailers will find their shelves emptying and re-stock them with shorts for people like me.

Then I will get out and start doing a little about that semi-inflated spare tyre and between us we will get the economy going, in a small way.