What is it with zips? Ask someone who knows about these things how to fix the zip on your coat, and they’ll pull a licked lemon of a face. Gravely, a head will be shaken. Very difficult, if not impossible. But why, you demand. It just is, you are told.
Early in the last decade, when I had more money than sense, I bought an absurdly expensive coat by mistake. I was at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 flying somewhere to cover a Champions League football match for ITV. Making my way to the gate, which was showing last call, I realised I hadn’t brought a coat. I think it was Basel we were off to, in late autumn. I’d need a coat.
I thumped my forehead with the heel of my hand, ran into the Harrods concession, tried on a coat, paid for it and fled. It was made by Dunhill out of some technical fabric and had a detachable inner bit to keep it relevant all year round. Just the job.
It was only when I took my seat on the plane that I saw the receipt: more than £600. Even though I was sitting down, I thought I might keel over. Next to me was my colleague, the ex-Arsenal player Lee Dixon. I showed him the receipt. Sometimes, he said, you really are an idiot.
I got the coat home, locked it away, and set about forgetting that the whole sorry incident had ever happened. Eventually I started wearing it, and before very long the zip bust. It did that thing when it splays open from the bottom. Humiliating, somehow. It was just the little thingy that had gone, the tiny thing at the bottom that you insert into the zipping thing before zipping it up.
I went to a repair shop. “Can you fix this?” I asked. “No,” said the woman. “But it’s only this little thingy,” I pleaded. “You must talk to the maker,” she insisted.
I made an appointment – yes, really, an appointment – to consult with Dunhill, whose shop is tucked away on one of London’s most exclusive streets. As I approached the door, as if by magic a man appeared to open it, usher me in, show me to a seat and offer me a drink. Seemed a bit over the top. I suppose this is what it’s like at the dealership if you take your Rolls-Royce in for a service.
I’d done a bit of research on zips and discovered that my missing thingy is called the insertion pin. Sounding incredibly Brummie in that environment, I said: “Have you got a spare insertion pin for this, please?” I could see in his eyes this was the daftest question that had ever been asked in this shop.
He explained that not only would the whole zip have to be replaced; the whole coat would have to be pulled apart in order to do so. And they couldn’t do that anyway, because mine was from the Links range, which had been discontinued. He said he knew a tailor on Savile Row who might – might! – consider doing it, at a price in the region of 250 quid. Not for the first time with that wretched coat, I worried about collapsing from a seated position. And get this: the Savile Row tailor eventually said he wouldn’t do it for any price.
What is it with bloody zips? For the want of a thingy a zipper wouldn’t zip, and for want of a zipper this epically expensive garment was useless.
I got a persuasive mate who does business with the original repair shop to beg the woman there to perform the operation after all. And after a week or so, it was done. Rejoice. And then the zip pull on the pocket went. And the only thing I’ve been able to find to replace it with is a cheap keyring with a black plastic fob. I hate zips very much. I’ve lost all faith in them. I’m now phasing them out of my life.
