IT'S almost criminal to welcome wet weather, especially when you know your offspring is at Glastonbury (Mummy said it would be muddy and Mummy knows best, so no sympathy there).

There is, however, another reason for being glad people have to don their macs and jackets. The sun brings out the worst in us, or the worst bits of us at any rate.

There are thousands of arguments against bare midriffs and men in shorts. A good many of them walk down your local high street every sunny day.

Sorry, girls, but strappy cropped tops and low-slung jeans are the most cruel revealers of bulges, even tiny ones. One of the younger generation explained: "They are so low slung that your hips don't really keep them up, so you have to have the belt so tight that anything over a size six shows a bit of a bulge." There aren't too many size sixes but, fashion being fashion, that's not going to stop anyone. Don't they have full-length mirrors in their bedrooms or is it that, provided they have the "in" look, the actual look is immaterial?

Another thing I can't understand is the girl in the ubiquitous strappy top, but leggy enough to look absolutely smashing in a mini skirt, who on a blazing hot day wears knee-high, wrinkly suede boots.

If they were genuine Uggs the fashion statement might be understandable, even if all it said was "because I can afford them", but they aren't, and must be insufferably hot.

It all goes to show what a fuddy-duddy I've become because, if I think back with absolute honesty, nothing's changed. In my teens, though, it wasn't the exposure of flesh that made our mothers wonder why we couldn't just dress to look cool and pretty.

Oh, the struggle I had to get my home-made summer dress (complete with the absolutely obligatory velvet bow and long streamers just below the bustline) hemmed at mid-calf length instead of on the knee. Why did I want to go round on a hot day with dowdy skirts drooping nearly to my ankles, making other people feel hot to look at me? Simple. Because all my friends were doing it.

If it got cool enough to need a sweater, I was in trouble again for "borrowing" a huge and baggy vee-neck from my father to get the must-have look, inelegantly known as a "bum-warmer".

No, nothing but the outward look changes when the fixture is mothers v daughters.

That leaves us with men in shorts and I wish it didn't, except for sport or on the beach. It isn't the young lads, who might stand a fighting chance of looking reasonable in them, because they are flaunting their street cred in cropped baggies. It's their fathers, grandfathers even, who expose the off-white flab and the varicose veins, often compounding the felony by adding socks with sandals. If there must be shorts, would some male fashion guru decree tropical kit as the must-have - immaculate, knee-length white shorts, with equally spotless knee-length socks. In my dreams!