Stephen Graham and Kelvin Fletcher

Thanks to the Duchess of Cambridge I have spent a week tossed on the turbulent seas of controversy. I don’t suppose she meant to hurl me into a storm, but she did when she released those photographs to mark her fortieth birthday. Many happy returns, and how wonderful she looks, I thought — and then I saw she had thrust her hands into her dress’s pockets. I don’t remember noticing someone do that before, so I tweeted: “forgive my ignorance, but are pockets in skirts a thing?” 4,734 people replied to inform me that they are a thing. So much a thing that it started an argument which lasted for several days.

Why? Because women love pockets for the same reason men love pockets — to put things in — but in spite of this, designers and manufacturers rarely provide them. Women have been complaining about it for years; unnoticed by me, for one, who just assumed pockets in dresses are as commonplace as pockets in my trousers. Perhaps that’s one reason why inequality in pocketage prevails, because men haven’t noticed. But that can’t be the whole story, surely? An on-trend friend told me that designers don’t like them because they disrupt the line of a garment that’s been carefully cut. You don’t see Kate Moss on the cover of Vogue with spanner stuck in her back pocket, do you?

And that’s the problem: women’s clothes are designed primarily to be looked at, not worn. At the haute couture end, they’re expensive wrapping for a precious beauty; at the High Street end, they’re still intended as eye-catching plumage if a lot cheaper. And for whose benefit? Men. Broad brushstrokes: men can be just as dressy, but ours is utilitarian as well as ornamental. My cassock, for example, a bespoke one-piece in Russell Cord, with thirty nine buttons, matched with a cincture and falls in shot silk, not only has pockets, it has slits to allow me access to underpockets, where I stow keys, face masks, communion wafers, a mini holy water sprinkler, bits of kit for this season of Epiphany, when God is revealed to the world. Like the shepherds and wise men, when we encounter him, we are revealed too. Not as others see us, or would like us to be, or even as we would like to be seen, but as we really are: equal in dignity, equally, infinitely loved; and equally entitled to somewhere to stow the dog treats.