AS uniforms go, the doozy I sauntered about in at middle school was something of a classic.

While girls at neighbouring schools merely had to put up with variations on a red, white and blue theme, lasses in my neck of the woods had to wear gold shirts under purple pinafore dresses.

If only I had lived in the woods - neck, back, armpit, I couldn't have cared less - my blushes would have been spared. But no, I lived at the far end of a busy estate. An estate which I had to walk through every morning, in all my purple and gold glory, to get to my school at the other side.

I wasn't alone. Dozens of us had to trail along the road, dragging our graffiti-covered satchels emblazoned with such poetic words of wisdom as 'Me 4 Dave 4 Ever' and 'Frankie says...get knotted geek-face' behind us, muttering and moaning about our sartorial lot.

I once tried to sneak under the wire past the school snipers (or teachers, as they liked us to call them) wearing a mohair cardigan over my pinafore, but was spotted through their telescopic rifle sights within seconds.

On a separate occasion, my friend daringly wore a white shirt, claiming her customary gold number was in the wash (it was in the bin). She was picked up by the guards and marched to solitary confinement, where she spent the day doing her best Steve McQueen impression, which would have been believable if Hollywood's blue-eyed boy had looked like a snivelling, ginger-haired schoolgirl with a bad perm.

Having said all that, you might be surprised to learn that these tortuous memories of being forced to wear a hideous colour combination for four years have done nothing to shake my stance as a pro-uniform advocate.

School uniforms are a great leveller. No one looks cool in a purple pinafore and no one cares what label adorns a gold shirt (especially as that label is usually a name tag sewn with little skill on the inside collar by the wearer's mum).

There is more than enough pressure on kids to wear the right thing outside school.

Whether they appreciate it or not, the six or so hours they spend in uniform is a blessed relief, giving them time to think about something more taxing than whether Juicy Couture is hipper than Diesel.

While I'm all in favour of uniform, some decisions made about school dress are not uniformly good. A headmistress in Dorset has decreed that girls at her middle school must wear trousers at all times, as the previous diktat of knee-length skirts did not preserve their modesty during music and drama.

First of all I have to ask, since when do girls have any modesty?

From my years of research, most girls - especially those who fall into the middle school age bracket of nine to 13 - are about as modest as a barrel full of Big Brother contestants, talking about themselves constantly at high volume and flashing their knickers at every opportunity.

And second, if we agree to disagree on girls being modest in the first place, why can't they simply be given the choice of wearing trousers if they fear they might spontaneously combust with embarrassment in the playground if a boy catches the merest glimpse of their navy knickers during an overly-enthusiastic bout of cartwheeling?

Forcing girls to wear trousers is an extreme, over-protective reaction to a problem that doesn't really exist.

Heck, why not ban them from participating in music and drama all together for fear their modesty might be corrupted by the wicked musings of that medieval saucepot Chaucer or the risqu lyrics of the Oompah-pah song from Oliver!

Updated: 10:53 Monday, June 27, 2005