Hi °C | Lo °C 
Oh, as it were, no. The financial crisis has thrown up a plethora of stories about how citizens are reacting: eating more sausages; knitting house extensions; leaving elderly relatives outside in the hope that foxes will get them.
However, it gets worse with the shock news that men are rediscovering their masculinity. They're becoming “machosexuals”.
Some readers may recall the “metrosexual” phenomenon. I don't think there were many of them in Belfast, right enough. It was more of a London thing. I forget the exact detail, but the gist was that, ignoring whole aeons of evolution, these males paid attention to their appearance. They used moisturisers and had manicures.
I can't think what brought this on. It was supposedly something to do with chaps now being able to buy lotions and whatnot surreptitiously on the internut. Research indicated they were nearly all at it.
But the stories were overblown. Plenty of men were shopping on the internut, but their purchases consisted mainly of novelty condoms and homeopathic cures for baldness. The usual stuff.
That didn't stop Boots thinking it had spotted a trend and, consequently, opening men's branches of their stores. They never worked.
It was still faintly embarrassing for a man to be seen coming out of Boots. Either there was something wrong with them, meaning they were wimps, or perhaps they were even in for reading glasses, rather than squinting manfully at restaurant menus and pointing vaguely at what they wanted.
“I'll have that please. With chips. Thick ones.”
“But that is a picture of the head chef, sir.”
“Well, just bring me anything that's made of meat with blood oozing out of it.”
“Do you wish salad with that?”
“No, just additives and dextrose.”
Even if they weren't wimps, there was still something dodgy about being in Boots, a suspicion that they were up to peculiar things with creams. As it happens, I pop into Boots occasionally, but only to do that man thing of standing at a junction of the aisles looking bewildered.
I don't think the metrosexual thing had much effect, other than leading some men to take a machete to their nasal hair.
But now, for some reason, the financial crisis is pushing us the other way, to staying unshaven — hooray! — and even being (it says here) “slightly smelly”. Way to go, guys! At last, perhaps, I can rejoin normal society.
You say: “What has being smelly and unshaven to do with the financial crisis?” Fair question.
One assumes these blokes aren't making a career change and becoming tramps.
These are normal men with mortgages to feed. They're just toughening up their appearance, because it's rough out there and only the manly survive.
At an emergency press conference last night, a top professor shrieked: “When the economic times get tough, men often refocus on core masculine values.” Fine, but you won't have much luck turning up at job interviews with a four o'clock shadow and reeking of sour sweat.
Still, I suppose it signals you're ready to stay the course and that, crisis or no crisis, you're going to make it as a professional dancer.
