Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
For a few glorious months, Alex Bilmes was a tall person. Then it all came crashing down
What’s in an inch? Last June, on assignment for this magazine at a health clinic by the shores of Lake Geneva, I had my height measured: “183 centimetres,” the nurse murmured to herself as she noted it down. “What’s that in feet and inches?” I asked, bending to slip my trainers back on. She tapped my question into her phone. “Six feet exactly,” she said. As I ascended to my full height – now medically certified as “impressive” – I fancy I glowed a little with unearned pride. Six feet exactly!
This was welcome news indeed. Because until that precise moment, for all my adult life I’d thought I was just under6ft tall. Specifically, an inch under. And, as such, like my fellow 5ft 11in titches Brad Pitt and David Beckham, I was, or believed myself to be, tantalisingly short of what is generally acknowledged as the desirable starting height for a man of my age, nationality, ethnicity.
That word “short”, here, means “less than” – literally and figuratively. If there is a status attached to height – and there is – then 5ft 11in doesn’t quite measure up. Six foot is manly, commanding. Five-11 is acceptable, unremarkable. But a near-miss. It’s the upper end of almost. It’s the missing inch that might as well be a foot.
But what did I care about that now? A qualified healthcare professional at a renowned facility had measured me, and 183cm was the height she had recorded. It was there in my medical file, and subsequently it was printed in the Financial Times – a newspaper with a head for figures. It was official. I was 6ft. By no means a giant. But on another level from those short-arse losers Brad and Becks.
“Wait till I tell Oscar,” I thought – Oscar being my son, and also (unsurprisingly) his mother’s son, and since she comes from a family of unreasonably tall people, a beanpole well on his way, at the age of 13, to overtaking his old man, and not afraid to point this out with wearying frequency. So what if he will soon tower over me, the lanky git? I’m 6ft. Any taller than that is showing off.
Six months after my encounter with the Swiss nurse – an Edenic interlude, I now realise – in January of this year, I was measured again, also for HTSI, at another clinic, this one in Mayfair: “181 centimetres,” said the nurse. “What’s that in feet and inches?” I asked, although I think I already knew. “Five-11,” she said, and I shrank a little – literally, figuratively, statistically. My six months as a six-footer had been snatched from me. I’d been reduced, belittled, taken down a peg. On no account, I decided, must Oscar find out.
Most men reach full height between the ages of 16 and 18; women around 14 or 15. The average height for men worldwide is around 5ft 7.5in (Elton John). For women it’s around 5ft 3in (Drew Barrymore). In the UK and the US, the average height for a man is around 175cm or 5ft 9in (Johnny Depp), and for a woman, 163cm or just under 5ft 4in (Madonna). Dutch men are the tallest at 6ft (Tom Hanks). Central American and south-east Asian men are the shortest, at around 5ft 4in (Michael J Fox).
My source for all these famous feet and inches is celebheights.com – a site unknown to me until I started researching this piece, but now I can’t imagine how I lived without it. Because size matters. Perhaps it shouldn’t but it does, and anyone who suggests this is not the case is deluded – or, you know, short.
Size matters for women too. But possibly in slightly different ways. All short people are at times overlooked, again literally and figuratively. But while smallness can be a source of shame for a man – find me a man who wants to be referred to as “petite” – it’s perhaps less defining for women. Very short men can be funny, or angry, or energetic, or all three, but less often are they seen as sex symbols. (The priapic pop genius Prince, at 5ft 2in, is the obvious exception here.)
If a famous man is short, he’s famously short. If a famous woman is short, that is a minor detail. No one claims that the singer Sabrina Carpenter (4ft 11in) or climate activist Greta Thunberg (4ft 10.5in) or gymnast Simone Biles (4ft 8in) were motivated to succeed principally by the desire to overcome a height disadvantage. Which is not the case with Tom Cruise (5ft 7in), Bono (5ft 6in) or Mark Zuckerberg (5ft 7in).
“It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world,” wrote Ian Fleming – who was 6ft, the same height as his creation James Bond, the enduring symbol of swaggering masculine potency. Fleming’s is the familiar sizeist line on short men, that they overcompensate by being aggressive, domineering – even psychotic. Napoleon Bonaparte is the totemic sufferer of Short Man Syndrome. He gives his name to an alternative name for the condition: the Napoleon complex. The only undermining factor here is that the bellicose Corsican wasn’t short. He was 5ft 6in, which was well above the average height for the time.
Megalomaniacs come in all shapes and sizes. For every Putin (disputed, but 5ft 7in), there’s a Saddam Hussein (6ft 2in), and for every Stalin (5ft 5in), there’s a Gaddafi (6ft). Hitler, at 5ft 8in, was neither especially tall nor short. Of his enemies, Churchill, at 5ft 6in, was on the smaller side, but de Gaulle, at 6ft 5in, was énorme. At military school he was known as the Great Asparagus. What do we learn from this? Not sure. Except the French could try harder at nicknames.
In recent years, the idea that power-craziness arises from a position close to the ground has been conclusively disproven by the incumbent American president – who is 6ft 3in according to him, and 6ft 2in according to everyone else, including the unimpeachable (I use the word advisedly) celebheights.com. Imagine falsely inflating your height by an inch! Surely only a stinker like Trump would even conceive of such low-down skullduggery?
Given the evidence, why do we persist in assigning positive associations to the tall and negative to the small? Why was I so pleased to be 6ft tall and then so crestfallen to discover that, actually, I’m not? Does it all, ultimately, come down to sex appeal? (I can answer that: yes.)
Small consolation (very small) for the vertically challenged: while the science is not conclusive, numerous studies suggest that short people live longer. In 1992, a World Health Organisation investigation indicated that men of 5ft 7in or shorter lived about 7.46 years longer than those of 6ft or taller. Which gives them even more time to shrink further.
One of the indignities of ageing – the subject of the story that took me to Switzerland, and my inaccurate measurement, in the first place – is that in most cases the older we get, the shorter we become. And while it’s unlikely that last summer, at age 52, I was 6ft tall, and now, at 53, the decrepitude is kicking in and I have already shrunk by 2cm, the fact is that at some point, most likely in my 70s, if I’m lucky enough to live that long, I might be a diddy 5ft 9in (Slash). Or even 5ft 8in (Keir Starmer). I don’t imagine I’ll mind too much by then. After all, unlike those half-pints, I’ll always have those six months in 2025 when I was 6ft tall – and a copy of HTSI to hand to prove it.
