Anyone who is familiar with the British Honeysett cartoon characters of the 50s and 60s will relate to my description.
It's like going back 50 years, with beige being the fashionable colour of choice.
Clothes look as if they've been resurrected from charity shops, many of which can be seen in the high street with not-so-cheap price labels.
Many shoppers can be seen wearing grossly miss-matching items of attire, in particular the men.
We're not talking about the snappy fashions that can be seen on London streets, but more the smaller towns and cities throughout the country.
When it comes to up-to-the-minute fashion taste I'm afraid to say that the Brits, compared with - dare I say it - those across the channel, just haven't quite got it.
Anyway, now further north, we've booked into a self-catering cottage in the absolutely lovely village of Richmond. Still in Yorkshire, but much better situated now to explore the dales and moors, headlands, cliffs, town walls, steel mills, coal mines and woollen mills - and of course the countryside of veterinarian/writer James Herriot. It's all here, including the churches and monasteries begging to be explored. Fishing ports of Staithes, Whitby and Robin Hood's Bay about a half-hour drive away. They say that if you want the world's best fish and chips, Whitby is the place to get them, although the ones we got at a motorway layby on leaving Gatwick airport on our first day took a bit of beating.
Talking about airports, no matter how much you prepare yourself, there's always drama that is totally out of your control, like having to stand in a hallway for half an hour prior to boarding because the plane was late.
Why couldn't we have just been asked to stay seated in the departure lounge a little longer?
And the painfully slow lifts that were so slow, you'd be better off carrying your bags up the adjacent stairs.
The final straw, however, was when all the coins fell through a hole in the carefully folded plastic money bag with several rolling under a whole stack of baggage trollies, never to be seen again. Any thought of pulling out a few to get in underneath was immediately scotched as they were all chained together requiring a pound coin to separate them.
Holiday transits are hard work and tempers can wear thin after a series of seemingly impossible mishaps.
And while on the subject of coins, why oh why do the British and the French find it so hard to let go of their copper coins which are next to worthless and are simply a damned nuisance. After buying 39.99 ($56.94) worth of petrol in France and giving the cashier 40, I was given a one centime coin change which is about the size of a fingernail.
On checking the news back home in New Zealand I was surprised to see that Prime Minister John Key's ponytail-pulling incident dominated the headlines. I can tell you that such petty news makes our country look pretty stupid from this part of the world. Tempting as some ponytails may be, no woman deserves to have their hair tugged - certainly not by a stranger, but come on, surely the fuss that's been made over this particular incident shows us how fickle society has become. I can see a change in cafe coming up for the Key family.
-Brian Holden has lived in Rotorua for most of his life and has been writing his weekly column for 11 years.
