Underwearable

We had a morning of colossal effort due to having decided that somehow we would manage to get ourselves organised and out to work by one o ‘clock in the afternoon.

As you are undoubtedly aware by now, we are going away on our holidays in less than a fortnight now, and as you will have often been told, we are trying to raise cash with this splendid goal in mind.

It is a complicated goal, because it is not just to raise a few coins with which to pay the ferryman for our passage, or the associated expenses of being abroad, like buying plastic rifles and fairy dresses at Disneyland, nor even is it just to cover paying things like the electricity board and the mortgage whilst we are away.

I am not going to pay the gas board, who can get stuffed because I have rung them and told them that I think they are rubbish and I am going to change my supplier, and they can jolly well manage without my £7.80 direct debit every month, that will teach them.

There are all sorts of other complicated little expenses involved as well as the obvious ones that you think about when you take the monumental decision that you are going to abandon your way of life for a whole week and go and trespass on somebody else’s space.

To start off with there was the matter of Oliver’s trousers.

He has got three pairs for school, which were only a bit too short, and two pairs for weekends, which I have just replaced and so they fit him reasonably well, and about six pairs in the drawer for skateboarding and tree climbing and building dams in the beck with Harry. All six were worn to threads at the knees and about four inches too short.

This does not matter with flip flops in the summer, but looks ridiculous with shoes and socks in October, so we needed to replace them, and replace them with enough trousers to take away in the camper van so that he could have a clean pair every day.

Oliver needs clean trousers every day.

It turned out that the comfortable ones that could be adjusted fairly easily to be the right size cost £12.99 each, which turns into a lot when multiplied by six.

Then there are the repairs to the camper van, which included a costly glue which Mark likes very much because it seems to fulfil every conceivable adhesive function imaginable.

The final and conclusive issue, however, was my own clothing problems. These were of a similar nature to Oliver’s, in that I also didn’t have enough to last for a whole week away from the company of the washing machine: although after that the differences were more marked, and things became rather more delicate because my difficulty was underwear related.

The thing about ladies’ underwear is that it costs an absolute fortune. Two bits of lace strung on elastic will, as any hopeful gentleman knows, set you back sixty quid.

I am long past the elastic lace and ribbon stage of underwear, and much prefer substantial and comfortable as my selection criteria of choice.

Unfortunately this is no cheaper, although items this purchased have the advantage of being more robust and therefore better capable of surviving any and every sort of unsuitable washing procedure, including the odd accidental boiling.

Mine have been boiled, which made them a bit tight and scratchy, and chucked in with jeans, which has turned it all grey, and it has been tangled round loose threads during the fast spin, which has pulled some of the fasteners off, and all in all it was inappropriate dress in which to be run over.

I am not planning to be run over on our trip to France, particularly since I have witnessed some of the drinking habits of French ambulance drivers at first hand, but nevertheless I would like to feel that I need not be ashamed of the most intimate garments adorning my person. I would like to walk round buses and French taxi drivers in the full confidence that my undergarments are shining white, beautifully fitting, securely fastened, and above all, present, because I have got sufficient quantities to wear clean underwear each and every day despite being a long way from home and without the benefit of our own personalised laundry facility.

In consequence of this I have just spent a hundred quid on clothes that nobody except Mark and possibly an intoxicated French ambulance driver will ever see.

In a the way that an anecdotal butterfly’s  wings flapping in the Himalaya cause hurricanes in Essex, that is why we had to leap out of bed early this morning, and rush round hoovering and making sandwiches and tea.

It is because of the French ambulance drivers.