A Brief Encounter

So, continuing with the ageing theme:

As I sat on the loo at a motorway service station this week, three things occurred to me.

1.  The poster on the back of the cubicle door.  It baldly stated that "an urgent need to empty your bladder is not an inevitable part of ageing" and signed off with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, "help is closer than you think".  I felt the last part lazy, as if the copywriter was trying for a snappy finish but with complete disregard for his poster's ultimate destination.   When I entered the cubicle I was fairly confident there would be a lavatory.  So help was not closer than I thought, it was exactly where I expected.  And indeed, if help had been any closer, I wouldn't have been able to open the door.

2.  The Dyson Airblade is so stunningly beautiful in its simplicity I could cry.

3.  I really am too old to wear polka dot knickers.

This last one's been creeping up on me for a while like a wedgie, bringing with it a similar sense of undergarment unease.  Every time I wear a pair I feel that somehow my spot-swaddled arse is being age-inappropriate.  A Woman of a Certain Age Wearing Polka Dot Knickers lies within the cold, dark, outer reaches of the clothes-swap universe, wobbling a sheepish orbit around a Toddler Clumping About in Mum's High Heels sun. 

I look ridiculous.  For one thing the spots aren't small or discreet, dusting my bottom buns with fun yet tastefully restrained hundreds and thousands.  Nuh-uh.  These spots are black, and the size — and I know because I've measured them — of the nail on my index finger.  The background is a bright, brilliant white, the sort of white you only ever see when a portal opens into the afterlife. 

The overall effect is of a bum covered in impetigo stapled to a body that's run in the wash.   Plague-chic, I like to call it.

So why wear them?

Essentially to get my money's worth, and in a stubborn and admittedly confused act of defiance against Marks & Spencer's nefarious multi-pack undercrackers policy.

Ladies, you know what I'm talking about.  In every multi-pack of M & S undies, there's a rogue pair, an agent provocateur.  It's brief, if you will, is to look as ugly as possible; to have an appearance so hideous that any self-respecting woman would immediately thrust it in a drawer with all those other manky undies — y'know, the lifers.  Grey, broken and deformed, they spray elastic threads of floppy pubic hair as if through a life-time of service they've taken on aspects of their host like the alien in John Carpenter's The Thing, reasoning they might be less likely to end up ripped and polishing windows if they can engender recognition and establish a rapport. 

Marks & Sparks have ensured that the results of this instantaneous knicker decommissioning are two-fold.

1.  The woman has to buy replacements before she's even worn any pairs from her multi-pack, because now she hasn't got five, she's got four and while five may have seen her between wash loads, four sure as shit won't.   So now she's in a quandary.  Okay, she could buy another multi-pack, but taking into consideration the further decommissioning necessary from that pack, she's straying into the realm of diminishing returns, and as a canny shopper (illustrated by the fact that she's buying multi-packs) she's reluctant to take that path.

So, our shopper looks for a single pair to add to her five (which she understands implicitly is really four) giving her a grand total of six (five) which should see her right 'til wash day.

But buying a single pair of knickers means stepping outside the circle of safety, leaving behind the security of multi-packs and all she knows gusset-wise to face the very real danger of knickers on hangers.

When Blake wrote about tigers, he couldn't know how his words would go on to equally extol the terrible beauty of The Knicker on a Hanger.

"What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

What with their 'touch me!' fabric,  'no VPL!' promises, and seam-free seductiveness, a woman could lose her head and all besides down amongst those silken aisles of rose pink and ivory loveliness.  With such scraps of gossamer perfection at her disposal, a woman could almost believe that varied and inventive sex could happen to her!

(As an aside, Knickers on Hangers are obviously designed by women, whereas I suspect multi-pack knickers are designed by men.   Multi-pants often have a seam running from front to back.  Now, seeing as sitting on a strand of barbed wire isn't something most ladies volunteer for — we're hardly going to add to an already packed curriculum of periods, childbirth, episiotomies, prolapses, DP and sex with horses afterall — and seeing as we all know men think women keep their most precious and sensitive nerve endings in a little Paperchase bag tied to their bra with ribbon, it's not too much of a stretch imagining men couldn't see the harm in expecting a bird's privates to straddle the poly-cotton equivalent of the Great Wall of China.)

Naturally our shopper, overwhelmed by acute Knicker-on-Hanger brainitis, now feverishly believes lingerie could become a lifestyle choice, blows her budget by buying half-a-dozen pairs, unwittingly contributes to the credit crunch, causing banks to crumble and sparking home repossessions right around the globe. 

And all the while Marks & Spencer chuckles throatily into its dividends and instructs its sweatshops to churn out an even greater number of pig-ugly multi-pants with polka dots.

So, we've established that Marks & Spencer's primary reason for this shameless multi-pack knicker rigging is financial.

2.  The second reason is chastisement.  The runt in the the undercracker litter has been bred specifically as a corrective tool. 

"Sure," says Markies.  "You can be economy-minded and buy a multi-pack, but it comes at a price and polka dots is where you start paying.  If you must persist in your foolish quest for thrift management, we will break your spirit with the application of small bows attached to your knickers like injured craneflies.  We own you, and any knicker-buying autonomy you lay claim to is nothing more than a carefully constructed DELUSION.  Like The Matrix, but with less martial arts and cool stuff."

Here I am then, in my polka dot shorties. 

I will not be broken, dammit.  Y'hear me, Markies?  I will not be broken!