Letter from Simon Kelner

It's dress-down Friday again. Or, perhaps it should be dressup Friday, if the latest pictures of that cricketing idol turned poster boy for male grooming, Shane Warne, are anything to go by.

There he was, off to play golf in a rather fetching caramel ensemble, mobile phone looped on to his belt, and topped off with aviator shades. "Another fashion crime" was how the Daily Mail described it, and certainly he looked rather less like the rugged sporting hero some of us would like him to be.

We have a very clear image of the Aussie sportsman: part Crocodile Dundee, part Les Patterson (the beer-soaked cultural attaché of Barry Humphries' invention). The trouble with Warney is that, since he hooked up with Elizabeth Hurley, he's become just a little bit Edna Everage, too. The man who once tweeted that, during a round of golf, he'd consumed "a bacon sarny, three sausages in bread, cheese s'wich and a Mars bar" has lost two stone in four months, and thanks, he says, to the liberal use of Ms Hurley's array of moisturising creams, he now has a complexion smoother than a first-day Test wicket at Lord's. The fight for first use of the dressing table in the morning chez Hurley must be something to behold, but I'm not sure we should treat the Warne makeover with so much derision. Surely, we should applaud a man who works hard at his appearance in an effort to please his woman.

And just because he's an Australian cricketer of legend, he doesn't have to emulate his former teammate David Boon, who, in 1989, set a record by drinking 52 cans of lager in the course of a flight from Sydney to London. Also, shouldn't we applaud Ms Hurley, who has achieved something that, in my admittedly limited experience, every woman would like to do: meet a man, find herself attracted to him, and then change everything about him so that she might like him even more! Top marks, Liz. You truly are a national treasure. On that subject, did you see the news this week that the latest survey of England's tourist attractions has revealed a healthy rise in admissions, particularly in free attractions like museums and galleries. I was reading this when I overheard an American teenager, inspecting the skyline of London, looking towards St Pauls and the Tower of London, say to her parents: "Wow. It's so, like, vintage." Have a great weekend!