Everyone has lucky pants, but no-one has lucky pants like mine. Tonight after some fairly unsavoury visuals involving a stupendous amount of beer and a mop and bucket, conversation up the FIDF hall raged about pants.
You see I am grieving the sudden, unexpected and completely unnecessary demise of my lucky pants, which while still extant in The Alpha Phi Beta house currently are only really having a lying in state before I go in for a ceremonial funeral pyre in the chicken run tomorrow morning, load ‘em up on a small boat and shove em off into the South Atlantic with an ache in my heart and a droplet of moisture on the end of my nose.
My drinking muckers this evening felt my pain, but they didn’t really UNDERSTAND. Simon muttered on about having pants he had at uni. His missis poo-pood this claim but she herself has been known to affect a leopard print thong so at least she was involved in the debate. When I explained that my pants were 28 years old, I received many an askance glance and felt it best to draw a veil, but it doesn’t matter how I try and put the terrible loss to the back of my mind, the empty black knot of suffering in my stomach is still there. So forgive me for indulging in a eulogy to my pants.
It was April of 1984 and as per I was loitering about in Stratford On Avon eating smoked salmon and cheesy wotsits before an evening performance of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’. Being an excitable sort of 14 year old who had just read Zola’s Nana for the first (though alack – not the last) time, I felt the need for a cami knicker and lo! Out of the green mists of M&S they called to me siren-like;- a navy satin, be-sprigged with pink roses. £4.99 down and my pants and I became one.
Over the intervening two and a half decades my pants and I have seen life in all its rich variety. They have, being somewhat sizable, multiple uses. Shorts in the summer, pulling pants, half an outfit during my days of gurning on the dance floor of Heaven, the regular holder up of corner shop rubbish tights and indeed, in the days when I had a massive permanent wave that made me resemble Captain Caveman – a head band/snood affair.
The pants have experienced the dark times too. There was the hellish embarrassment of their revelation when the frock got caught down the back while I was returning from the lavvy and sauntered seductively across the Savoy Grill to join my Gentleman-style date at table. Tumbleweed moment. No second date. Blast those massive pants!
I wore them the afternoon my waters broke with the Heir, they were stolen briefly by horrible children when I went skinny dipping in Sutton park when I was 16 (try explaining that one to the driver of the 110 bus back to Tamworth when you are clad only in palm fronds). Sitting comfortably on my harris they saw in my 21st, 30th, 40th and the ruddy millennium. They have witnessed the fall of The Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union. They have travelled to many an exotic location including New York, Magaluf and Guildford-city-of-sin. Those pants have had experiences mere mortals can only dream of
There was also the 74 hours spent wearing them on a Greyhound bus half of which time I was suffering the after-effects of a dubiously constructed BLT ‘Torpedo’. They withstood the ensuing boil wash without any difficulty, but could they withstand the inhuman strength of a Falklander Islander? Could they arse.
Now I don’t mind a bit of physical strength in a gentleman. The ability to punch a horse into a coma is something I find mildly arousing but there has to be limits – my personal limit being DO NOT RIP MY 28 YEAR OLD PANTS IN HALF. Particularly when I am still wearing them. I’ve got a mark on my person that no amount of Germolene will stop the chafing of. I wouldn’t mind, but time has certainly proven the tensile strength of those pants. I have a feeling they made the outer skin of the Apollo Luna Excursion Module out of the same material. Which leads me to wonder how strong you have to be to tear them in the first place.
My recommendation? Don’t bet in a fight with this geezer…..
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