Pants

As my bit of world appears to be  more than usually in turmoil today; I thought that I would discuss underwear. Now, gentlemen may find this topic empty of interest, or too too blushmaking, so you are excused. Ah, I see some of you are still here...oh well,  I expect you have your  reasons. Ladies and others who wear female garb will agree, I think, that underwear comes in two sorts. There is that which is meant to be seen, and that which is far better hidden. The latter tends to offer more in comfort and support than the former. Most ladies have a Drawer Of Shame, in which there lurks unspeakable unmentionables.Do not go there, men. Disillusion will surely follow.

Fancy pants fans, of whom I am one, find solace in delectable underpinnings. When a day is gloomy, a child is recaltricant,or a disagreeable task awaits, I find that getting into one's more attractive undergarments provides a bit of a lift. To the spirits as well as to the embonpoint. I always used to wear my most pleasing lingerie at interviews. Necessary though it is to look sensible and competent in a professional environment; I used to find this lowering. So under my natty corporate suiting, lace and strappy things would be frothing away unseen, to perk me up and remind me that I was me,and not to be pinned down my psychometric testing or "in-tray" exercises. Parent's Evenings are also occasions that I have found daunting. There were two children of my son's name at his first school. For purposes of instant identification, mine was known as "The Naughty One". When you go to a P.E, you are often made to sit in a tiny chair,prior to being hectored by a teacher who,unnervingly,may appear themselves to be awaiting grown-up teeth. I found it helped immensely to be wearing satin Janet Reger scanties under my "Concerned Mother" outfit.

Sometimes I sit and pore over my more delicious little things, like a goblin groping his gold. I may have mentioned that I unwisely became entangled with the French for some years. One of the many areas of incontrivertable uncompatibility was underwear. Although I admired the diligence which the French women I knew applied to their pursuit of lingerie; I could not keep up with all the rules. You had to have matching sets, they had to be eyewateringly expensive, hand-embroidered by nuns, and they were worn for the delectation of one's  "'uzzband and lovvaire" alone, NOT paraded drunkenly in front of one's loucher girlfriends who all wanted to try them on. I suppose the extreme anthesis of French fundamentalism is the lady I saw the other day. She  was walking down Slater Street with one lace-topped stocking nicely suspendered, and the other one tied around her forehead. When I was first a teenager, bra straps were meant to be concealed. A couple of years later,the brassiere entire was a thing of matronly ridicule. You had to go braless, and look liberated. Not easy if you had a bust like a bolster. I couldn't wear smock tops because I looked like a pregnant Appalachian child bride, nor could I wear boyishly-cut cheescloth shirts. They made me resemble an only slightly effeminate lumberjack. Hippy dresses, wafting in fairylike fashion from the tiny shoulders of my petite friends, turned me into a madwoman with milk fever from a Victorian medical textbook.

At this time, I wanted to look like David Bowie. I had the pallor, the eyebrows, and the hair. But the androgyny was a hard one to pull off, and to ape the King of Single-Figure Hip Measurements when shaped oneself like an Edwardian dirty postcard, was, I now concede, sheer insanity.  Fortunately, Roxy Music popped along with their pin-up girl 50's schtick, and I exhaled with relief. I hadn't breathed out since 1973.

Now, lovely girls with curves and bosoms are the thing once more. And retro-styled undies are the derniere cri. Several companies specialise in replica versions of stern girdles, and long-line pointy brassieres. Waist-training corsets romp all over the pages of the most conventional catalogues.

But no-one has yet seen fit to revive the Liberty Bodice,scourge of my childhood,and I can appreciate that bone-coloured flannelette might have a specialist appeal.

Speaking of which, I was slightly taken aback by E-Bay recently. If you are browsing for undies, and you type in "Vintage", you are immediately taken to a world of ambiguity.For in addition to the cheeky and cheerful 40's-style  6-strap suspender belts, and foamy petticoats on sale, there are many items advertised as being not only second-hand,if "hand" is the word, but also "heavily used".

Well, I never. And to think that, like most ladies, I have been throwing mine away, when I could have been posting them all over the world for gain? Oddly, there is no equivalent  market for the aged Y-Front. How dismally sexist.  I shall write to Harriet Harman without delay. I bet she wears matching sets of ladygarments.

So in the realms of the cheerful pick-me-up;  a scenty bath, a glass of bubbly, and an hour re-arranging one's undies to soothing music is not to be sneezed at. And now,when you tire of your collection,  ladies, remember, there is a dear pervert somewhere in, say, Newport, willing to part with £34.00 plus postage, to give them a new lease of life.