BRITISH summertime, 1977. I’m stood in the playground of Holycroft Primary School, Keighley, West Yorkshire. The sun is beating down. There are blobs of tar oozing through the cracks in the Tarmac. Kids are running around.

‘All join on for army, no girls allowed,’ goes one line of lads.

Girls skip, a few balls are kicked around. Marbles are tossed. Birds sing in the trees outside the walls.

And I’m having an accumulative attack of the stupids. They’ve been building up since Monday. Today is Friday.

One of the chief concerns of any 11-year-old boy in 1977 is the imminent outbreak of World War Three. (Well, it is in our school. We’ve all read 2000AD comic. We know what’s going to happen.)

‘Hey, Woody,’ I shout at my mate as he walks past, chatting up Julie Newton. (He’s what you’d call advanced with the lasses, is Woody, on account of his easy way in a Starsky and Hutch cardigan, Wrangler jeans and real Adidas pumps. Not those cheap, imitation ones I wear from the shoe mill’s seconds shop in town that have only two stripes down the sides instead of three.)

‘Hey Woody,’ I shout again – just in case you’ve lost the narrative thread – ‘If war broke out now, would you go home and change?’

Before he even answers, I know that he’s going to say no.

‘No,’ he says.

I told you.

And the reason why he wouldn’t go home and change is because the way he’s dressed is cool.

‘I would,’ I say weakly.

But Woody’s not listening because he’s too busy making Julie Newton go all red and giggly. (The way she’s dressed is cool, too: a polo neck under a shirt and culottes.)

The reason why I would go home and change is entirely my fault.

It’s 1977 and punk rock is raging. On the other hand, the Bay City Rollers are the vicar’s biscuit. And Showaddywaddy and Mud dress as Teddy boys. Fashion has gone mad.

I know this from first-hand knowledge because I’m standing here in the playground wearing a pair of brown, 100% polyester, Oxford bags. The flares are so wide that they cover my feet. They have a high waistband with two rows of four buttons on the front.

Halfway down each leg, on the outer thigh, there are button-down pockets. Each trouser cuff has a turn-up you could smuggle surfboards through Customs in.

And bejaysus, do I feel stupid. And it’s all my fault.

A few weeks ago, I got these blue-canvas baseball boots with thick rubber soles which also happened to coincide with a rather brutal, sticky-outy haircut at the local barber.

‘Ha, ha, ha,’ laughed my older cousin, Foyi, luxuriantly ringletted and shod in wedges. ‘He thinks he’s a punk rocker in his punk-rocker boots.’

Punk? Me? I should have been proud and said: ‘Yeah, I’m a punk.’

But I wasn’t. I liked Geoff Love and his Orchestra’s Big Western Themes – my one and only LP.

Foyi and all his mates wore pinstriped Oxford bags with dozens of waistband buttons. They were black or grey and in tweed or wool or cotton. And they could put their hands in the side pockets and walk at the same time.

I begged my mum for a pair and she got me two – in green and brown – both in polyester.

Now I feel stupid and awkward and uncomfortable and I just want to go home and change. I don’t want to be kicking around the smouldering ruins of a bombed-out Keighley with other 11-year-old freedom fighters, bravely resisting the invading Volgons, dressed in a pair of brown-polyester flares.

I know I’ll wear them only once and the green ones not at all.

Oh, punk-rocker boots, where are you now?

But I know that’s not an isolated incident. Every man must at one time feel completely ridiculous standing in the clothes that he chose to wear that morning.

My mate, Wilf, told me what happened to him years ago.

‘One bright, spring day while working on a refit of the North Pier in Blackpool, I found myself unwittingly dressed in jeans, checked shirt, full leather tool belt, Caterpillar boots, hard hat and Ray-Ban Aviators,’ he said.

‘No alarm bells had gone off at all while I was getting ready that morning or even when I was getting tooled up. Not even when I girded myself for a hard day’s work and slipped on the shades.

‘No comments were made by any of the guys from work and even more bizarre is that nothing was said by any of the possibly 50-strong assembly of other men from companies from all over the UK.

‘Then I caught a glimpse of myself in a long window. You could probably have picked up my aura of self-consciousness from a low earth orbit satellite.

‘In an attempt to hide, I took one of the worst jobs that day – running cable all the way down the pier under the side benches. Bad, but at least I was out of sight for the most part.

‘What I didn’t know was that Cannon and Ball were starting rehearsals that day and had arrived with full press entourage. And where did they stop to get their cheap laughs on the mile-long walk down the pier to the theatre? You guessed it. Next to a member of the Village People they found crawling around on the deck doing tough stuff with hammer, drill and large drums of cable.

‘I took only so much. I like to think that that was the first time they had been told to *#%@ +!! in front of the paparazzi, though I seriously doubt it.’

Since that Oxford-bags day, it’s been a history for me of feeling stupid in inappropriate clothing. Nowadays, I have to wear a suit for my job.

I used to love wearing second-hand suits. This was in the 80s, during the golden age of signing on (1982 to 1988).

The thing is with second-hand suits, they come in 20-year-old increments. In the 80s, you could pick up a great 1960s suit (proper materials, silk linings, good tailoring), whereas nowadays you are more likely to pick up ghastly 1980s ones (man-made fibres, rubbish linings, big padded shoulders on the jackets, tapered trousers).

There was something good about kicking round in a 1960s suit during the 80s. New Romantics outside of Leeds looked like poor transvestites and Keighley mods never looked that sharp, but if you had a dark-green, John Collier two-piece or a black Burton’s demob suit with original braces, you fitted equally into town centre, moorland or pub – or wherever else you found the unemployed.

But not now. Now when I wear a suit I feel like an impoverished loss adjuster going through a mid-life crisis and living in a one-room hovel in Union Street.

I’m giving my sister away at her wedding soon. Apparently, I’m going to be dressed like the groom and the best man. Top hat? Tails? Gaudy waistcoat? Who knows?

It’s not until May, but I can feel it starting already: Shaun Shackleton, feeling stupid again, somewhere near you soon.