Following on from the Merseyrail knickers assailant and unsavoury though this information may be, ten per cent of British men admit to wearing the same pair of underpants for more than three days.
I don’t know if these men have some kind of pants rota to pass the briefs between each other but it certainly is something to think about as you contemplate bank holiday death by barbecue or garden centre bankruptcy.
In the olden days this May holiday saw my family’s first real rush to the seaside. Of course, there being no global warming in those heady days of the 50s and 60s, we could be assured of unseasonably high winds, thunder, lightening and occasional nuclear exchanges. But not before a brief pocket of sunshine in which to get sand in the egg salad butties and for my grandfather to set the car boot alight with his Primus.
He had an uncanny resemblance to Mahatma Gandhi, face leathery as a horse’s saddle and with about as many teeth, having worked out east in the oil industry. Basra, in fact, where men were men and there was no question of shared undergarments.
Later in life, now a widower, he took to riding out his rediscovered freedom to misbehave on an electric scooter along Blackpool prom with four other hell’s pensioners. The wild hair bunch. Queasy rider.
If it turns out mankind is responsible for making the sky ill my grandfather will have some answering to do.
Not because his labours kept the crude flowing. Deary me no. It was his forty-a-day camping stove habit.
To this day I could describe to you every layby on the A59 and A6 as far north as Lancaster. As a child I thought a day out was about test driving kettles. Perhaps it wasn’t years of Iraqi sunshine that turned him brown. Maybe it was the gallons tea trying to get out.
Invariably we would get to The Lakes just in time to brew up and start home before the rain struck. Or possibly a small earthquake.
“Have you had a good day,� mother would ask. “Two sugars please,� I would reply.
Recently I inherited the last of my family’s extensive collection of camping stoves. This weekend I think it may be a good idea to give them all a test run. Along with a couple of my own. Its a genetic thing, don’t concern yourself.
Tomorrow night our back garden will look like a Sahara valley full of Tuareg camp fires. That or a blazing Kuwaiti oil field.
Anyway, back on Monday with news of a 4x4 that’s 2x2. If I don’t set it on fire.
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