Uncle Dysfunctional by AA Gill

Author:AA Gill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

Dear Uncle Dysfunctional,

What shall I wear in bed?

Sam, Hastings

Sam, I can’t tell whether you’re a boy or a girl. Is that another problem we’re not talking about? And you don’t say if you’re sleeping on your own or with another boy or another girl or a rough-haired terrier. My grandmother, bless her heart (she is, as we speak, sleeping in what’s left of a plywood mahogany-effect coffin under a tonne of clay), always said that you should go to bed in the expectation that you may be woken up by a fireman. In her case, it was more wishful thinking than fearful. She always wore a wool nightie, a shawl, what they used to call an opera cardigan and knee-length bed socks, finished off with a hat. What she imagined this was going to do for the fireman I can’t begin to think, but as a small child I found it terrifying. She looked exactly like the wolf who’d eaten my grandmother. That doesn’t really answer your question, does it?

You see, it all depends on what you want to happen in bed. If you expect it to be the best bit of the day then, like Marilyn Monroe, you should perhaps wear just two drops of French perfume. And that goes for both sexes – everybody should go to bed smelling nice. In fact, everybody should wake up smelling nice. I go further, there is not an excuse, ever, not to smell nice, particularly your feet. And your bedroom shouldn’t smell like a Romanian STD clinic. Sorry, back to what you wear in bed. It’s all about intent and being appropriate for the job in hand. The very worst thing to find in bed is someone wearing pants. Nothing is more terminally prophylactic than pants in bed. They are either the ones you’ve been wearing all day, which doesn’t bear thinking about, or they’re the special ones you put on for lying down in. People who have dedicated horizontal underwear either don’t fancy you, or anyone else, or have incontinent effluvial issues. Either way, you’re not going there. And men who wear a combination of sports kit and underwear to go to bed in – which I see is so popular on soap operas and dramas about people who murder strangers – are again an unpleasant mixed message. Why would you want to sleep with someone who looks like they’re preparing to work out?

So it should be all or nothing. If it’s not nothing then it should be pyjamas or a nightdress, and they should never be ostentatiously erotic – it just looks like you’re trying too hard. And by the time you’ve got into bed all the due diligence has already been done. This is just the packaging your present comes in. I was trying to remember what the worst things I’d ever seen in bed were, and once I had a girl who couldn’t sleep unless she was wearing her father’s long johns. And then there was one

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