Bless ya, Smudge!
I'm not sure about the "headmistress" bit, Chelbel - I'm sitting here in my jimjams at the moment!
Talking of Jimjams......
When my then girlfriend and I bought our first home, an ancient cottage, it had no central heating at all. We bought it during the summer and didn’t realise it would be as cold as it turned out to be.
During the winter it really was colder than an Eskimo’s arse in a snowstorm. The only bonus was that we didn’t need a freezer; we simply stocked all our frozen goods in the spare bedroom, as there was no risk of anything ever thawing out.
I mentioned this to my mum and she suggested I take a pair of my Dad’s pygamas as he had, “Got a lovely new pair from Marks and Spencer’s for Christmas.” Rather than offend her I did take them, never for a moment considering I would ever wear them. And what a pair of jimjams they were. If you can imagine the uniforms worn by the crew of Star Trek you wouldn’t be too far off, though the trousers, bizarrely, had flares wider than Popeye’s bell-bottoms. Most striking, however, was the garish colour design: vertical zigzagged blue, red and white stripes. They were made of thick nylon, so you risked a minor static electric shock every time you went near them. I think my mum had offered them to the local charity shop but they’d politely but firmly declined to take them on the grounds of taste.
A couple of weeks later my girlfriend and her chums had a girls’ night out so I was left in on my own. This was the icy winter of 1982 and this night was particularly cold. Rather than sit there freezing in my bathrobe I thought, what the hell, I’ll wear the aforementioned jimjams. It wasn’t as if anyone would see me. Or so I thought.
I heard my girlfriend arrive home a few hours later and got up to meet her. But she was not alone. Unknown to me she’d invited three of her tipsy friends back to our industrial freezer-like home for a drink. One of her mates, Dawn, took an incredulous look at me in my jimmies and proceeded to laugh so long and hard her face was beginning to turn blue through lack of air and I suspected she was about to have a seizure. I was almost on the verge of calling an ambulance to give her oxygen. Dawn later told me I looked like a six -foot long length of toothpaste. As for me, I simply stood there, slumped, deflated, lost for words, almost weeping with embarrassment and humiliation. At least I was no longer cold as I burned with shame. That took some living down, believe me.
Life can be so cruel.
Ever since that evening I’ve never worn pygamas, and never will. The memory of that night still burns me like a red-hot poker. There’s more chance of Vanessa Feltz living on salads for a month than me ever wearing jimjams again.
