HOW TO TAKE OFF A JUMPER

It's that time of year again. The puddles in the allotment are crisp with white ice, the air is still and clear beneath the blue sky, and winter clouds hang above brittle branches. Also, the 'smart' gloves you bought are so useless you have to pull a bare thumb out into the cold, just to work out what time the next bus is due.

Oh and - I've been wondering about the best way to take a jumper off.

Yep, as the jumpers come out of the jumper drawer (lowest and fullest, and surely smoothest of the drawers), and I slip into one arm-by-arm, it's another reminder that at the other end of the day, I still haven't worked out the best way to take them off again.

How do you do it?

There's the rugby method - usually guys do this, I think. You just grab the jumper by the neck, and then with both hands pull it over your head.

I think this might be quite a popular one for the lads - though, there are some drawbacks: it ruffles your hair up like an Aunty at Christmas who still can't believe 'how much you've grown', oh, and it always seems that the jumper is somehow forced by the laws of physics to drag the underlying t-shirt with it, very much exposing your naked belly to the world.

That might be alright if you can style it out, or you have the Abs of Olympus, but unfortunately for the rest of us, while we're flashing our bulbous midriffs to startled onlookers, our heads are literally inside a jumper. You'd better hope no-one's photographing that Scooby-Do look.

Another way (and I think this is what I do) is the elbow technique. In this one, you pull your arms inside the jumper, one at a time, elbows first. Then you lift from the bottom of the jumper (inside), carefully over your head, using both hands to gather up the bulk of the jumper, and you stretch the neck so that the whole arrangement loops quickly over your head.

There are drawbacks with this too - your jumpers get stretched in the neck and under the arms. Plus it looks a little weird.

Are there other ways of removing a jumper out there? Maybe crossing hands and just pulling up so that it turns inside out? Does that work? And how do you cope with inside-out jumpers?

And is it weird that I spent so long thinking about this?