I blinked and walked away.

Then I blinked again. And I thought: "Why do I insist on wearing this stupid thing? Aren't I uncomfortable?"

No one seems to like ties anymore.

You see fewer and fewer of them.

There was an article in one of the broadsheets about it so it must be true.

"The age of the tie is unravelling," it said.

These days it's all smart-casual, dress down Fridays and Hey-Man-This-Company-Isn't-Square-Lose-The-Noose.

The punk and hippy generations have become middle managers and corporate bosses – but they're still sticking it to the Man, it seems, by keeping their top button undone.

It's a revolution. Of sorts. Or so it said in the broadsheet.

It's one I would have been happy to have been in the vanguard of when I was but a schoolboy.

In those days I'd tuck the tie into my shirt, or leave it off after PE, or occasionally wrap it round my head so I looked like Rambo without the vest or the muscles.

Back then, I didn't know the tie had been invented by Croatian mercenaries as a symbol of their elite status and religious freedom and during The Thirty Years War it was a symbol of repression. It made me look like my grandad.

Ah, he had, as regular readers may expect, views on the subject himself.

"Show me a man who has no use for a tie and I will show him just one," he said.

He wasn't known for understating things.

But, as years pass, I've come to agree. And it has become almost as rare for me to go anywhere without my throat knot as it was for him or much of his generation.

It's a love affair, I suppose, which started when I saw one band in particular.

"This one's called Soma," said the lead singer in thick NYC accent, and he clung viciously to the bootlace round his neck while chords spiralled round him.

Of course, no matter how many ties I've worn and no matter how viciously I cling to them, darkened windows have never reflected back his cheekbones or eyes, and my south Huddersfield accent has never picked up a Manhattan twinge.

But it matters not, for now the knot matters more.

Restoration poets, Victorian gentlemen and sixties Mods can't all be wrong, can they?

And so it is a love affair, I rather suspect, which will last to my dying day and which will be present even on my deathbed for, if ever a man should look smart, it is then when the future suddenly holds more possibility than ever.

"WHY do you insist on wearing that stupid thing?" someone else asked and I thought about Croatian mercenaries, aged hippies and my Pa's old man but none provided an answer.

It's because it looks inconceivably cool.