Most people wear gloves. But only in the Winter. And even then, they generally go for the weak, knitted woolly jobs, or heat retaining yet soft and comfortable artificial-fibre, cloth ones. These, needless to say, apart from their utilitarian drabness, are utterly useless when it comes deflecting the sharp, jagged, virally rich and unbrushed fangs of the body-biters (and are therefore not really very utilitarian at all, and are mainly just drab and uninspired).

Once upon a time, ladies and gentlemen would, as a matter of course, wear stylish, thin leather gloves (to avoid accidentally touching dirt, filth, or members of the lower socioeconomic orders), but those days are largely passed. Of course, leather gloves do provide a pretty good protective layer, and the thin expensive ones don’t take up too much room in your schoolbag. However, there are drawbacks.

• One: expensive leather gloves are often expensive.
• Two: expensive leather gloves in your schoolbag are a) likely to get stolen (in which case they afford no protection whatsoever), b) likely to get you accused of having stolen them, which gets them confiscated (in which case they afford no protection whatsoever), c) look a bit daft in summer, which makes them embarrassing, gets you ridiculed, and ultimately results in the gloves getting left at home (unless, as might very well be the case, you are very used to being ridiculed and don’t really care) in which case they afford no protection whatsoever, and d) are made of dead animal skin, which is, you know, kind of gross.
• Three: there isn’t really a number three, but for reasons of rhetorical balance, let’s just say expensive leather gloves are often fashionably snug fitting and are consequently a tad slow to put on.
• Oh, and,
• Four: stylish, thin leather gloves are, well, thin.

So, we can carry gloves in our bags, but don’t want leather tighties, woollen weakies, or recycled plastic warmies. What else don’t we want? Well, attractive though it may seem, we don’t want armoured leather gauntlets (well, we might wantarmoured leather gauntlets, because they are weirdly cool and great for hitting things really hard without suffering bites, bruises, or even defeat, but they do set off metal detectors, and they do piss off the do-goody teachers who disapprove of the inalienable human right to pro-active self-defence (which, if there are any lexically-challenged readers left reading this, means hitting people with something very heavy and hard (your gauntlets) before they even think about thinking about hitting you) so scratch armoured leather gauntlets).

What we dowant is gloves that don’t look too pricey, that don’t upset the staff (at least, not those staff who are still nominally human), that are easy to slip on or off, are warm, and, of course, bite repellant.

Anyway, who cares what your gloves are made of. The point is, are they bite resistant? Oddly most product description attached to gloves concern themselves mainly with questions of material, warmth or water-proofing. Very rarely do product descriptions for gloves mention things like ‘resistant to human teeth’, or ‘bite resistant up to 500 newtons’ (that’s about 51 kilogrammes force for those of you unable to google stuff). But, and this is important, some gloves are designed to resist the bites of rabid dogs, friendly cats, and overenthusiastic owls. If you can find a shop that orients its service to people who deal with dangerous animals you are onto a good thing. Alternatively, gardening gloves are usually pretty resistant to spikes and sharp pointy things because gardens tend to be pretty pointy spikey places. Pick them up when you go to buy your polycarbonate reinforced shoes.

Or, ladies and gentleman, return to the motorcycle shop! Motorcycle gloves are tough, unobtrusive, and, get this, are often available with tough plastic polymer inserts which, while excellent for protecting your frail flesh from tarmac abrasion, are also inordinately difficult to bite through! Isn’t that just yummy! And if you do get called out on it, just say your sister/brother/invisible friend/sugar daddy/mummy (delete as necessary) brings you to school on their motorbike and you need the gloves as protective accessories because your sister/brother/invisible friend/sugar daddy/mummy is a complete loony who laughs in the face of danger/death/the Highway Code/gummy bears and gruesome eldritch abominations from the dungeon dimensions (please note, ‘dungeon dimensions’ is an intertextual reference* and if you don’t get it, well, never mind, that’s why they invented google).

*Which is also, as mentioned earlier, a bona-fide literary technique. Thus confirming that this book, as also mentioned above, is real literature.**

** By the way, if you think these notes are a tad repetitive, repeating phrases is called ‘parallelism’ which is also a genuine entry in all quality encyclopaedias of literature, and is therefore another literary technique. Thus confirming that this book, as also mentioned above, is real literature.