The Postbag: Dispatches from the Locker Room
Six letters from the changing room: the unhurried strut, the towel years, a jammed locker, a dentist at the worst moment and eleven years of Tuesday swims.
The Postbag: The Home Front
Six letters from the domestic front line: a drawer amnesty, a mother who has bought the same pack since 1998, and a washing line the neighbours can see.
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The Postbag is where readers write in and the editor writes back. The correspondents are, let us say, composites. The situations are not.
We have spent previous editions in changing rooms, on gym floors and on other people's sofas, which was a way of avoiding the harder subject The Postbag: Away Games, Sofas and Spare Rooms. This month the postbag comes home.
Underwear is the only thing a man owns that is completely private and completely public at once. Nobody outside the house sees it. Everybody inside it does, sorted, pegged, folded, counted, and occasionally held up at arm's length for the consideration of the room.
So: laundry, wives, mothers, teenagers, and the pair that should have gone years ago. The last letter is not funny. It is short, and we have printed it as it arrived.
The Amnesty
Sir,
I write concerning an incident in this house on the second Saturday of June, conducted without warning, without consultation and without due process.
I returned from a garden centre to find my wife on the bedroom floor with three bin bags and an expression of settled purpose. She had conducted what she afterwards called an amnesty. My drawer was on the bed in three piles, labelled in ascending order of severity: keep, go, and "Michael, honestly".
I asked on what authority. She said thirty one years. I said that was a duration and not an authority. She held up a pair by one leg opening, at arm's length, in the manner of a person retrieving something from a pond, and asked when I had last worn them. I said that was not the point. She agreed that it was not the point and put them in the bag.
Nineteen pairs left the house. Fourteen, I concede, had reached the end of any reasonable service life. Five I would have argued for. One had been on a walking holiday in the Cairngorms and never once let me down.
I do not dispute the outcome. I dispute the method.
Yours, under protest and in a considerably emptier drawer, Michael Ardington-Fewkes, Solihull
The editor writes: The method was indefensible and the verdict was correct, which is the least satisfying combination available to a married man. Fourteen out of nineteen is a strike rate no independent panel would have bettered, which is why your letter is about procedure.
What you are owed is not the bags back but a say in the replacement. Count what is left, count the honest gap between your washes, add three, and buy the difference yourself The Drawer Audit: How Many Briefs You Need and When to Replace Them. A plain cotton rib brief in a measured size covers it, and a drawer restocked on your own terms is a coup rather than a defeat.
Nineteen Ninety Eight
Sir,
I am forty three and I have made a discovery about my mother that I do not know what to do with.
Every Christmas since I was fifteen she has given me a soft parcel containing a pack of white cotton briefs. Same shop, same pack, same everything. I opened it each year without thinking, in the way you do not think about the tide.
Last month I found a pack in the loft, still wrapped, receipt inside, and something about it sent me down to compare it with the one I opened this year. They are the same. Not similar. The same pack, unchanged, for twenty eight Christmases.
Here is my difficulty. If I say anything at all, even kindly, the tide stops. She will be mortified, she will ask what I would like instead, and next December there will be a gift card. I would rather have the pack, quite badly, and I cannot explain why to my wife, who finds the whole thing hilarious and calls it the annual delivery.
So I say nothing. I open it, I say thanks Mam, and I put them in the drawer.
Name and address supplied, though not to my mother
The editor writes: Say nothing. You worked out the correct answer before you wrote and were hoping to be talked out of it. We decline.
What she is giving you is not underwear. It is evidence that somebody still keeps a running file on what you need, which quietly stops happening to men in their thirties and which almost nobody notices going.
One duty comes attached. Wear them, because a gift that lives at the back of a drawer becomes a slow lie In Defence of Christmas Pants. If the size has drifted since 1998, mention the size and nothing else. That is a repair, not a rejection.
The Line of Sight
Sir,
I have two teenagers, sixteen and fourteen, and in April they discovered that the washing line is funny.
I do not know what happened in April. Nothing changed. The line has run from the house to the post by the shed for eleven years, in full view of the kitchen window next door, and that family has seen it all since 2015.
Now, when I peg out, there is an audience, standing at the back door with the studied casualness of two people absolutely not doing anything. My daughter provides commentary in the voice of a golf correspondent. My son says it is not about me and that he is observing the wind conditions. Last Sunday they applauded, quietly, when I reached the end of the line, and my wife, whom I had assumed was on my side, was filming from the utility room.
I have considered the tumble dryer. I know what you people think of the tumble dryer. The indoor airer merely moves my briefs to the front room.
I am not embarrassed. I want that on the record. I am asking what a man is supposed to do.
Duncan Frayle, Sowerby Bridge
The editor writes: Nothing. You peg out on Sunday and you take the applause.
Move indoors and you have conceded that the line can be won, at which point two teenagers simply relocate. Buy a dryer to escape a joke and you will spend years cooking your own waistbands to lose an argument you were winning An Apology to Every Pair of Briefs I Have Wronged.
The mechanism expires anyway. What is funny to a sixteen year old is the idea that a parent has a private life at all, and that joke dies the moment it stops getting a reaction. To speed it up, hang a colour. Navy reads as laundry rather than as material Why Men Are Frightened of Colour, and it spares white cotton the long summer sun, which greys it faster than the wash does Why Underwear Is White. A navy cotton brief is the least dramatic way to change the subject.
On the Subject of Forty
Sir,
I do my own washing and have done since 1987, and I am not one of those people who believes everything must be boiled, because I know what heat does to elastic, but I live with my brother in law, who arrived in March on what was described to me as a temporary basis, and who resets my machine to sixty degrees whenever he passes it, on the grounds that anything below that is, and I quote him exactly, not really washing, and when I raised this at the kitchen table with a garment in my hand as an exhibit, and explained that a decent detergent at forty does the hygiene job perfectly well and that the waistband I was holding had gone wavy inside a fortnight under his regime, he picked it up, sniffed it, and said he could not smell anything wrong with it, as though the absence of a smell were the whole of the argument and not the precise thing I have spent thirty nine years achieving by washing properly, and so I write to ask you to print, in plain terms, that I am right, so that I may leave this page open on the worktop where he makes his toast.
Terence Bick, retired, Melksham
The editor writes: You are right, and you may leave the page open.
Thirty or forty degrees with a good detergent, particularly a powder or tablet containing an oxygen bleach system, is correct for ordinary underwear. Those systems are built to work at lower temperatures precisely because nobody wants to boil their clothes any more. Sixty is for illness in the house, not for general virtue How to Wash Underwear Properly. Your brother in law has taken a rule that applies in one situation and promoted it to a philosophy, which is how most laundry arguments begin.
Two things will help more than being right. Wash underwear with the light things rather than with towels, since an hour against heavy terry loops is what starts the pilling. And a mesh laundry bag stops a waistband spending the cycle wrapped round a duvet cover, which is a quieter enemy than temperature and does not answer back.
In the Matter of the Blue Pair
Sir,
I want to defend a pair that everyone in this house agrees should have gone years ago.
They are navy, or they were. They have been washed so often that navy is now a claim rather than a description. The waistband is sound, but the cotton over the left hip has worn to the thickness of a handkerchief, and you can see daylight through it if you hold it up, which my daughter does, at intervals, for the entertainment of her mother.
I bought them in Cork the week before my first proper job. I have worn them on the morning of every interview since, including the two I did not get and the one where I stood up too quickly and put my hand through a display of leaflets. I wore them the day my son was born, not by design, simply because it was a Tuesday. I wore them under a suit at my father's funeral, and I remember thinking in the car that I was glad of it, and not being able to say why.
I know exactly what they are. A worn out pair of cotton briefs with a thin patch. I have not asked anything of them in years.
They are still in the drawer because a drawer is where you keep things, and because the alternative is a decision I have not yet found a reason to make.
M. Ó Conaill, Ballincollig
The editor writes: You do not have to make it. You have to stop filing them as underwear, which is the only part causing you trouble.
There is a difference between retiring something from service and getting rid of it, and underwear is not the sort of object anybody teaches you to keep. Nobody thinks it odd to have a ticket stub in a book. Take them out of the rotation, fold them, and put them somewhere that is not the drawer.
Then buy their successor while you still have the original to hold it against, because a good pair is far easier to specify when you can point at one. A well made combed cotton brief covers the next twenty five years of interviews Buy It Once: The Durability Guide to Briefs That Last Years.
Your daughter will keep holding them up to the light. She will also be the one who knows where they are when you are not around to ask.
The Brand She Always Chose
Sir,
My wife did the shopping for forty one years and I did the garden, and I have not renegotiated that since she died in the spring of last year.
I have worked out most of it. The one thing I have not changed is the underwear. She always bought the same brand, in the same style, from the same shop, and twice a year now I go in and buy it myself. I go on a Tuesday morning, when the shop is quiet. The woman at the till knows me by sight. She has never said anything and neither have I.
I am not sure this counts as grief. I think it might simply be that somebody made a decision a long time ago, it was a good decision, and there is no reason on earth to overturn it now.
My son thinks I should branch out. He is thirty six and he means well.
Arthur, Whitstable
The editor writes: There is no reason on earth to overturn it.
Your son is right that other things exist and wrong to think that is relevant. She spent forty one years working out what suited you, which is research nobody else is going to repeat. Acting on it now is not sentiment. It is the sensible use of good information.
Twice a year you walk into a shop and buy what your wife chose, and a woman behind a till who has never asked understands the whole of it. We would not change a thing, including the silence.
Go easy on the garden this summer. She would have said the same.
The editor's postscript
The home front is the one nobody warns you about, because it is the only front where the other side does your laundry. Those of you facing the same problem in somebody else's house will find company in The Postbag: Away Games, Sofas and Spare Rooms, and the reader still working on his brother in law should see The Postbag: How I Converted My Mates.
Questions people ask
How often should you replace your underwear?
Replace on the state of the waistband rather than on a calendar. Stretch it about ten centimetres and let go: it should snap back immediately and completely, and once it returns slowly or stays wavy the garment has stopped doing its job, whatever the fabric looks like. In regular rotation most everyday cotton pairs reach that point within one to three years, sooner if they go through a tumble dryer.
What temperature should you wash underwear at?
Thirty or forty degrees is right for almost all underwear. A good detergent, especially a powder or tablet containing an oxygen bleach system, cleans effectively at those temperatures and is gentle enough to preserve the elastic. Reserve sixty degrees for illness in the household. Repeated hot washing shortens waistband life and can shrink cotton unevenly, so wash underwear with other light items rather than with towels or bedding.
How many pairs of underwear should a man own?
Take the number of days between your laundry cycles and add three. Washing weekly means about ten everyday pairs; washing twice a week means about seven. The three extra cover a day that needs a mid-day change, a wash that slips, and the pair in the machine when you are counting. Base the sum on your last few actual washes rather than the routine you intend to keep, and add separately for sport and travel.
Can you put underwear in the tumble dryer?
You can, but it is the single most damaging thing most people do to their underwear. Heat degrades elastane and rubber elastic, so one dryer cycle costs more recovery than weeks of wearing. The usual result is a pair whose fabric is still sound while the waistband has gone slack and wavy. Cotton briefs air dry in a few hours, so a line or an airer costs very little time.