29-06-2025
Hurrah, budgie smugglers are back! I wear mine supertight
Budgie smugglers are back! So says The New York Times, only it prudishly calls them 'swim briefs'. But whichever, the fact is, for some of us — well, me and Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast, anyway — wearing smugs never went away. Here's why.
When do you wear swimming trunks, eh? Well, first and foremost, to state the obvious, for swimming. And for proper swimming, such as I do, you want tight and skimpy. I don't swim often enough or well enough to merit a pair of competition-standard 'jammers', the longer version of smugglers favoured by the likes of Adam Peaty. But I'm sufficiently serious about hydrodynamics to not want to thrash up and down the lido in baggy board shorts, the pockets all inside out and bulging with trapped air. Score one for smugs.
The other main activity you do while wearing swimming trunks is you don't have sufficient privacy to go naked, like I do on my roof, observed only by passing 747s circling east London before heading upriver to Heathrow, then you want as little covering material as is necessary to not get arrested. You want to maximise the tanning area, right? And minimise the tan line? I see guys sunbathing in shorts, sometimes quite long shorts, and I think, 'Lightweight.' Go hard or go home.
I draw the line at a thong, though. Bit too close to sumo wrestler for comfort. Plus, as an 11-year-old, I was traumatised by the sight of an elderly Frenchman on a beach in Corsica wearing nothing but a lime-green thong, skinny mahogany buttocks sagging down for all to see. It was not a good look, especially as the front of the thong, the pouch, was made of mesh. Dirty old goat.
Third, counterintuitively given their name (you might call it the Budgie Paradox), smugglers are actually less revealing of what must not be revealed than their looser, more voluminous competitors. Fair enough, the genital outline is undeniably defined, with little left to the imagination. And yet, thanks to this very smuggler snugness, you are in no danger of what I learnt from Friends the Americans call 'showing brain'.
Basically, your goolies aren't going to suddenly squirm free of captivity and burst out into the fresh air to frighten people, not when held in the rigorous containment provided by the Tom Daley-style micro-trunks I favour. So, while they might be more suggestive, smugglers do as promised and hide the contraband, never bringing it up on deck to shout at customs, 'It's a fair cop! Where do I pay the duty?'
Obviously, you've got to monitor the state of your elastic. Growing up, we had a dear family friend we'd visit every summer in Cambridge. Having spent most of his life in the tropics, this chap — a natural eccentric to start with — had become more than a little disinhibited. Punting on the Cam, he wore smugglers so loose they qualified more as a loincloth. Each time this chap pushed off the riverbed with his, ahem, pole, first one testicle, then the other, would swing rhythmically into view. Push, left testicle, push, right testicle, like a pendulum. It was mesmeric.
No one seemed to mind. They were less puritanical times, the Seventies. On that same holiday to Corsica, 1976, the one where I encountered the lime-green mesh thong, I also discovered women sunbathing topless. That remained the norm around the Mediterranean — well, the European bit of the Mediterranean — until the early Nineties. If you'd asked me then, I'd have predicted that by 2025, on a hot day, never mind the beach, we'd probably all be coming to the office or going shopping naked, or at a minimum in just shoes and pants.
That was before I realised social progress doesn't move in a straight line, but in peaks and troughs. And also before I realised that coming to the office in just your knickers is not in fact the stuff of social progress, but individual nightmares.
Oh yes, we have these taboos for a reason. Years ago, at an especially dull Labour Party conference in Blackpool, I bunked off to go for a swim at a swanky golf hotel in the suburbs. Lacking a costume, but with a pair of tight black underpants to hand, I risked wearing them. All went well until, showering poolside, in full view of a dozen ancient golf widows, I looked down to see my penis hanging impudently through the flies of my improvised trunks.
Not good. A dangerously quick 180 to restore modesty, followed by a hasty exit, and, still damp, a retreat to the railway station to get the hell out of town.
I learnt my lesson. On the road, some colleagues keep their golf clubs in the car boot in the hope of a cheeky nine holes post-deadline. Others pack their trainers and gym kit. I always travel with a pair of emergency smugs. They take up remarkably little room.
