In The Closet

Alright, ya bastards, own up. Which one of you did it?

Igor, lock the doors! No-one gets out till I get an answer.

Come on, which of you did it? Which of you crept into my wardrobe in the night and replaced all my tightest shirts with these baggy, flappy-in-the-breeze humungoid articles?

I'm waaaaaaiiiting...

Seriously, when I noticed in the middle of the night that my Victoria's Secret night...ahem...shirt was baggier than normal, I thought "Well, yeah, you've stretched the bejeesus out of it, d'uh!"

Sigh...I'm not gonna get the second half of this observation out to any purpose, am I? You're all still struggling to scour the image of your fat, bald and above all indisputably male correspondent in Victoria's Secret nightware, aren't you?

Right. Fine. Let all secrets of the boudoir be open to the world. The story goes like this. A while back I had the delight known to tabloid writers everywhere as the "SWINE FLU TERROR!!!!"

Sick as a pig, as it were, for a week. Could hardly get out of bed, sweating like a...well, you get the idea. Nothing I owned would stay dry on me for long, and it was all too horrible and constricting.

Ahem...

d had a red Victoria's Secret nightie - plain, no frills, just red, OK, my experiments with transvestitism go only so far! - which was loose at the neck, and which covered me. Did the trick nicely, Tony goes to Lala Land and is soon snoring peacefully, working on breaking that sonofabitch fever that's been giving us all Hell for a week...

Shortly after that, I started suffering from what felt oddly like a frozen shoulder. This is because, when it comes down to it, I'm a man. For which read "stupider than a dumb dog that won't come in out of the rain". It was winter, we had a heavy comforter on the bed. I'd get too hot, and fling the thing off me with an almost theatrical flourish...while still asleep. Then, when we woke up in the morning, I'd be a frozen flabcicle - on more than one occasion, d thought I was actually dead! - and I'd have this frozen shoulder. d put me back in the Victoria's Secret at night, bish bash bosh, shoulders protected from dramatic comforter-flinging, Tony's a happy boy in a slightly sexy red nightie.

Of course, eventually, we found me some proper nightshirts of my own - the Edwardian striped fashion-monstrosities to which I've already admitted in this blog. But by that time (any idea how long it takes to find nightshirts in my size in this country? In what was, by then, summer?), I'd stretched Victoria all to buggery and back, so our nightware is now practically interchangeable - oh yeah, it's a great big gender-bending fiesta round our house come snoring-time, you should come round...
Actually, no, don't...

ANYWAY, where the Hell was I? Ah. Yes, so, when I discovered in the night that my Victoria's Secret nightshirt was baggier than before, I figured, "Well, yeah, you've stretched the bejeesus out of it, d'uh!"

But then this morning, I slipped on a blue T-shirt that had been getting a bit pointy over the magnificent peaks of my man-breasts, and riding up more than somewhat over my second belly (the one comedian Dylan Moran perfectly describes as "a gift from Death!"). This morning - no pointy-tightness, no ridey-upness...and creases. I mean actual FOLDS of material around the midriff, that have to be straightened and pulled down towards the ankles to look like anything more designed than a bedouin robe.

So either ten pounds of human lard has a bigger impact when you take it away than five pats of butter looks like it would have...or one of you devious bastards has been creeping into my closet at night to give me a false sense of triumph...so which of you is it?

Not talking, eh?

Right.

Igor, bring the vaseline and the hat full of ferrets...