As we’re almost all the way though October and heading for November, I’m sorry to say that shorts weather is well and truly over.
Unless you want your knobbly knees knocking together as you freeze in the colder temperatures it’s time to wear pants that actually make it down to your ankles – unless, of course, you’re a postie.
Come rain, shine, snow or hail these veritable terminators of letter delivery will be marching from door to door clad in shorts, the vital legs which carry them about the country so they can deliver letters exposed to the elements.
Ok, you will see some of them wearing trousers, but plenty of posties are still out in shorts long into the months when everyone else has put their shorts away.
It might seem a tad baffling to the rest of us, why postmen and postwomen don shorts to tackle their routes each day.
The cold weather is nothing compared to the power of a postman’s shorts (MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Fortunately, some inquisitive Brits have had this very question on their minds and took to Reddit to ask it, where postmen and postwomen both past and present came up with answers.
One particularly popular response said: “It really is just because it gets hot doing the job.
“One round I cover I wear trousers just because of the wind (made the mistake once and had windburn all up my legs) but it’s that particular village happens to be the highest point of the town and is a massive wind tunnel. All other rounds I’m in shorts pretty much all year.”
Another postie chimed in to say they ‘hate sweating’ and that ‘walking around all day used to make me sweat my balls off’ – hence the shorts.
They did add that in very extreme weather cases they might pop on the waterproofs, but another postie said that ‘skin is waterproof’ and ‘walking all day is hot work’.
That seems to be the prevailing opinion among the postie hivemind, walking around all day with everyone’s post is a cocktail to become marinated in your own sweat by the end of the shift, so wearing shorts helps keep the body cooler.
Big jacket up top, shorts and bare calves down below. (Patricia Hamilton/Getty Images)
It’s not hard to imagine that trousers which get sodden with rain would take longer to dry than just applying a towel to your legs.
You never really saw Postman Pat in shorts but he didn’t have to spend hours trudging around Greendale delivering to hundreds, if not thousands of addresses each day.
Another former Royal Mail employee said that posties would even make it interesting amongst themselves by setting challenges for who could last the longest in winter wearing shorts.
They explained that everyone would stick a quid in the pot each week and the winner got to donate it to their chosen charity.
Given that nobody wants to walk around until they’re more sweat than man, wearing shorts seems pretty understandable.