'V' is for.....Ventilation?

I hate buying clothes. Strike that. I hate having to buy clothes - going out deliberately to shop for an article of clothing. With the possible exceptions of underwear and jeans, wandering around stores looking for something to wear generally feels like a criminal waste of time that invariably ends with bad feelings all round. I chalk it up to the fact I spent my formative years (far) East of Adelaide where genuine Levi's were for fancy boys with real money.

So, of course, I was shopping for clothes last weekend. In a little less than 2 months we'll be traipsing through a Central American rainforest and, according to Dee, I'm woefully under-clothed for the expedition. I've seen National Geographic and I know the lack of modesty shown by the locals down there, but Dee has seen too many Tilley Endurables adverts to let me off the hook.

Out I went - and I think I did pretty good, too. I got myself a lovely pair of overpriced NASA-designed jungle pants that can turn into shorts. They're made of space-age materials that block the Sun's evil rays and, apparently, never get wet. One of the dozen or so tags on the pants uses the phrases 'wicking action' and 'extreme punishment' quite a bit, so I'm pretty stoked to see the kinds of adventures I'll be having when I wear these pants. I'm thinking: Kathleen Turner (the '80's version) and golden idols or something.

I also picked up a couple of shirts put together by the same Nobel-winning scientists. They're even separate colours - pretty unusual by guy standards. But here's my beef: I can't find V-neck t-shirts anywhere. I like V-necks. They ventilate well, they don't feel constrictive, and they afford an oppotunity to display a bit of chest hair when the need arises. But these space-age polymer shirts are, like, crew-neck or something. When I wear them I spend all my time pulling the front of the neck opening like some kind of lame Rodney Dangerfield impersonator.

Perhaps they'll keep jungle spiders from falling down my neck. Oh, the sacrifices I make for eco-tourism...