Hello my name is Humphrey and I have a glove fetish.
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It started out with wearing gloves to work in London and Scotland, my Australian hands were crying out, begging for me to do something to relieve them from the numbness they had come to feel, so I got an innocent pair of calf skin casual wear gloves. They were great for about a week, then I started to feel I needed more from them. I began to notice that what they offered me was no longer enough - I needed a better fit, I needed more feel, I needed more sensation - and they just weren't giving it to me. So I got another pair, then they weren't enough so I began desperately searching for more, always more, ever more. Alas, I have a problem, and not just the compulsion, which compounds the issue. I have ugly hands. There I've said it.
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I have fat fingers. Not just fat but short. Sausage fingers – but not the thin sort of sausage that sits daintily on a hot plate and slips effortlessly into a piece of bread at the BBQ. No, I’m talking your homemade beef steak and onion specials that are almost bursting out of the skin and look like they could peel open like overripe melons at any minute. Love ‘em as sausages, not so much for doing up the 5mm nuts on a bolt. I have short,fat, bloaty fingers, and everyone who models gloves or is used as a template when designing gloves have obviously got beautiful long, Rachmaninov-loving piano-concerto-playing glories. They must be slender, and dexterous, and wonderful. Mine look like an old arthritic gorilla had his hands amputated, run over by a Land Rover (or Land Cruiser if that is more your game) a few times, gnawed at by the flea bitten village dogs, then transplanted onto the ends ofmy otherwise quite masculine and shapely arms. Women have hit on me in bars, presumably because of the otherwise shapeliness of my arms, until I pull my hands out of my pockets to pay for a round of drinks, at which point they clutch the sides of their heads and collapse into poor little compressed balls of woe and grief on the bar room floor, saying "Don't touch me with those hideous things" over and over and over (and over) again whilst dribbling and generally making a fairly pronounced spectacle of themselves and my hands. People stare.
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This makes getting gloves off the rack difficult, and in fact damned nigh impossible, so I have resorted to having them custom made. It is a dirty little secret, and one I don't tell many people, please don't hold it against me (after all this is a non-judgemental part of the forum). It all started when I was doing a lot of motorcycle track/road racing (amateur status only) (and not terribly good). When one is racing one needs touch. One needs feel. For all their grotesqueness my hands are very sensitive. Both tactilely and emotionally, I guess, but anyway. But when your sausage fingers only fill the first two-thirds of the finger sleeves, that’s a whole lotta flappin’ around in the breeze to contend with whilst braking from 270km/hr for a hair pin bend and banging the farings of the bloke who was making gorilla noises before the race.
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So now I have eight pair of custom motorcycle racing gloves, and I don’t even race anymore. I have three pairs of ‘social’ gloves and I live in Australia again where the gloves would just be useful to stop sweat pooling on the table in the pub. I have three pair of ‘trekking’ gloves for walking on glaciers and doing the odd bit of climbing – and I live in Australia. I have gloves in every leather to have once roamed the earth. I heartily recommend kangaroo, by the way. Supple, warm, breaths well. Great traction, very tactile. Very abrasion resistant if that’s important to you (ask me how I know…).
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Anyway... Thank you for letting me get the secret out in a safe and non-confronting environment like this. Now if only someone were to start on for woollen trekking socks, cos let me tell you about my feet!...