Two Chaps Talking

Dear Boy,

I have, of late, been much exercised by the thought of ladies' underthings.

No, wait. Allow me to explain myself.

When a chap first has dealings of a carnal nature with a gel, undergarments are, without fail, of the finest - dark gossamer traceries, impossibly complex engineering, crisp, new and matching. As the relationship develops, an evening is reached when the chap knows that he is smitten. During the inevitable pillow talk he appraises his partner of the fact and at that very instant, the lingerie disappears. Suddenly, without warning, the enflaming trappings of passion are replaced by dreary, quotidian, functional underwear. The kind of stuff that may once have been black, white, coy pink, or any one of a palette of gay pastels but is now invariably boiled down to a homogenous pinkish blue/grey with slight fraying at the side seam.

"Ou, to paraphrase Francois Villon, sont les thongs d'antan"?

It will gladden your heart to know that I have formulated a range of hypotheses on this matter, some seemingly logical, others, frankly terrifying. Vis.

1) The transubstantiation theorem

It is a widely held belief that the underwear concerned is actually changed, in a physical sense, in the drawer. Others believe that the transubstantiation of the underwear is merely symbolic. The debate has raged across Europe for centuries. Sir Thomas More's treatise 'Upon My Ladyys Nether Thyyngs' caused eight nonconformist Corsetieres to be burned at the stake in France. Queen Elizabeth, is said to have formed the Order of the Garter in direct response to her sister Mary's comment in a letter "With drawerf Lyke that, your Graciouf Majestie, thou lookst likely to remain our virgyn Queene for the forfeeable future". Sporadic sectarian bickering still occurs with devotees of La Perla regularly stoning wearers of St Michael in the streets.
The English, with ecumenical aplomb, have formed their own special sect which ignores pants qua pants, sublimating any desires in tambourines and tea.

2) Hawking's Trans-dimensional Wormhole

This states that the both lingerie and underwear co-exist in parallel universes. The cooling of passion causes flexion of space/time or, when expressed six dimensionally, 'pinching'. When these precise cosmological conditions prevail a tiny wormhole opens in the bottom corner of the drawer and, in less than a nano-second, the garments transplace. The few scientist who have attempted to understand the breadth of Hawking's thinking have often been driven mad. This is not because the protocol is particularly complex but that it requires us to accept an entire universe where women only wear crap pants on first dates then raunchy drawers for the rest of their relationships.
Stephen Hawking is the only man who has ever been able to prove this hypothesis to his own satisfaction. Is it any wonder they have to wheel him around dribbling?

3) Cognitive Phase-Shift (Meeker and Webelfetz. UCSC 1968)

When Mike Meeker and Schlomo Webelfetz first met at the University of California, Santa Cruz, nobody imagined that these two unlikely characters would change the entire face of psychological research. (Meeker was an All-State running back on a sports scholarship and Webelfetz, a semi-pro skateboarder auditing classes in the Tarot and Rolfing). Their research into the lingerie/pants dichotomy grew from a summer project in New Mexico. In Zuni legend Amit-hai-pooni was a changeling god who appeared in different guises to each worshipper. According to Meeker's autobiography 'Bringing Power and Effectiveness to Human Excellence' they had been drinking peyote tea for eight weeks when Webelfetz commented that this was 'Cool' and Meeker had the revelation that would solve the pants problem...

What if pants had no objective quality of desirability and the 'alteration' was entirely perceptual?

Eight years of research followed, much sponsored by the CIA. Student volunteers were hooded, floated in tanks and fed huge quantities of hallucinogens before being shown pants. No matter what kind of underwear they were shown their reaction was always exactly the same - they giggled and slurred the word 'Cool'.

Meeker is now a personal effectiveness coach in New York, Webelfetz is running a cult out of a trailer park in Oklahoma.

4) The Ffitch-Cadogan equation

Originally propounded by Rupert Ffitch-Cadogan at Cambridge in 1955. Ffitch-Cadogan was a well-born dilletante physicist of little innate talent. (His father endowed the Ffitch-Cadogan Laboratories in 1953, the year his son went up).

He suggested that...

Where fabric = f
Age = a
Desirability of wearer = w

and...

[{f/w} 3.1519 - Kvr] /w + f /{187987987.7} = x

...then

If x> 666.978 then lingerie
If x< 666.978 then underwear

Sadly Rupert's judgement was called into question later that year when he was caught in flagrante with his bedder in the quad, sent down and defected to the Russians.

History has yet to prove if this was any great loss to theoretical physics.

5) The low-number/conspiracy theory

This is my own particular favourite theory but one that undermines many of our deeply held beliefs. What if there are only a limited number of sets of decent underwear? What if it's all a plot? What if there is a central clearing house with an 0800 number? What if your partner sneaks from the bed while you bask in post coital glow and rings the number...

"Hullo. Control? Mission accomplished. I've got him. Send a courier to pick up the date knickers and hand them on to the next operative".

I think it's time I did some work

T