I am a natural scruff. You know how some people can get out of bed and throw on the first thing they find, shake their head to get their hair out of their eyes, and look absolutely gorgeous? Well, I'm the exact opposite. I look crap even if I spend hours grooming myself.

Actually, that's not quite true... with a lot of work, I can make myself look good - not fabulous, not gorgeous, but acceptable - and I will stay that way for about 5 minutes. If I am lucky. You see, I have all kinds of habits that work against the glamorous look. I fidget. I fiddle. I rub and I pick and I ruffle. Makeup gets smeared almost as soon as it has dried, as I forget and rub my eyes, or bite my lip. Mascara gets spread around my eyes so I look like a panda, and lipstick gets smudged off in uneven patterns. When I am thinking, I lean my forehead on my hand and push my fingers through my hair, wrecking whatever style I had tried to impose on it.

I don't stand up straight; I slouch. I don't sit straight either; I lean. I wriggle and I scratch and I squirm. Whatever I am wearing gets ruffled. What faint suggestion of a line my outfit might have had is lost, and wrinkles appear in all my garments in an instant. To stop this happening, I would have to be put into some kind of stasis, where I didn't move, didn't breathe, didn't eat - oh god, above all, didn't eat!

You see, I am not just a natural scruff; I am also a messy eater. Food naturally gathers on the front of my shirt, by some kind of vegetable magnetism. No matter how careful I am, something is going to drop off my fork and onto my body at some point during a meal. My breasts (which regular readers will know are pretty hefty) form a kind of shelf on which the falling food lands, providing a natural collection point. There's only two ways to stop this happening:

1) Crouch forward so my head is directly over the plate; any food that I drop will land back on the plate rather than on me.

2) Drape a large napkin over my ample bosom.

Both options make me look like an idiot, although in different ways. Option 1 also has the disadvantage of making conversation with the people I am sitting next to hard. And it gives me backache.

Actually there is a third solution that I wish were possible. I want an adult-sized pelican bib - that's the bibs babies wear that have a kind of bucket arrangement on the bottom to catch the food they discard. But then it probably wouldn't work because my tits would get in the way.

It's probably just as well that I don't care much about clothes or fashion. I did try, when I was a teenager, but the realisation soon dawned that I was crap at all this glamour stuff, so while my friends were experimenting with makeup and wearing short skirts and skimpy tank tops, I continued happily in my jeans and t-shirt. My mother had to bribe me to get me into a dress for those special family occasions where dressing up is required.

I was always aware that men had it much easier than women. Men aren't expected to care about clothes or fashion. No one thinks it odd if a man doesn't make much of an effort. I had my first experience of the different way society views male and female dress when I was very young - at about the age of four, in fact. It was a hot summer afternoon and I was running around in the garden with my younger brother and a couple of his friends. We were all wearing shorts but no shirts. My mother called me inside and told me I had to put a shirt on. She didn't explain why; she didn't make my brother wear a shirt; she just made me wear one. Little girls weren't supposed to run around topless, I guess, even though at that age I had short hair so looked just like a boy anyway. That was a bitter lesson in gender politics, although at the time I didn't think of it that way; I just thought she was being SO UNFAIR!

There is one area of fashion that men are heavily involved in - they design it. It's men who make the decisions about how long skirts are going to be, what styles are going to be in this year, what stupid and uncomfortable things women are going to squeeze themselves into in the name of fashion. The fact that most fashion designers are men is the reason why fashion is so uncomfortable and impractical. They know they will never have to wear it themselves so they don't have to consider it from the inside.

Men also drive the cycle in which clothes that are perfectly acceptable one month are suddenly hideously old-fashioned and out-of-date the next, and must be discarded even though they are still perfectly wearable, and replaced with the whatever the latest fashion is. Oh, that skirt is so last-year - this year hems are 1 millimetre higher. Designers in collusion with businessmen in cahoots with ad men in a conspiracy with magazine publishers, they are all in the business of brainwashing you into spending your hard-earned dosh on replacing your entire wardrobe unnecessarily.

What's even more depressing is that in the shops this year are fashions identical to the ones I tried to wear in the seventies. They didn't look good on me then, and they would look even worse on me now, but clearly today's glamour girls find it all deliciously new and different and haven't yet cottoned on what a huge con it all is.

The whole thing just makes me want to cry. But that's never a good idea. Some people can cry and remain attractive - they look all frail and glamorous, making people want to comfort them and wipe away their tears. Not me. When I cry, my eyes swell up and my face gets blotchy, as if I had some nasty illness. Nobody wants to comfort me - they want to back away in case whatever I have is catching.

They needn't worry. Lack of fashion sense is not a communicable disease.

The Diesel's Dump web pages and all the articles on it are copyright © Fi Craig 1996-2012.

The art on the Diesel's Dump site is by Robin Grenville Evans, a professional artist and cartoonist.
See a selection of his work, and contact him about commissions, at http://www.grenville-evans.co.uk/index.html.