I was out buying the morning paper, having just got out of bed, at about midday. Don't judge me. I had driven home from Bridlington last night (one of the funniest audiences I've ever had - especially the woman who thought that if she hid under the table no-one would realise she was on her mobile phone) and not been in bed til after 4am. My life is different to yours. Anyway I don't need to explain myself to you. Leave me alone. Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged. I think that has told you. Some people.
Just as I was going into the newsagent, a mother was coming out with her two children. Her younger child, a boy of around about 8 or 9, was wearing his pyjamas. The lazy tyke! Still in his pyjamas at this time of day? And don't tell me he was gigging in Bridlington last night and had had to drive back overnight, because I was there and know he was not on the bill and also he is too young to drive. Your hypothesis has fallen down on two very obvious levels. Why don't you think things through next time? What he was doing was wrong. And don't come back at me with Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged and think you're cleverly using my own words against me, because this is different. It is important in this instance to judge lest ye be not judged, because what this child was doing was wrong and evil and must not be contenanced.
I had just got out of bed and had had the decency to pull on some outside clothes (luckily really as I sleep in the nude), so I don't see why he should get away with it.
For a younger more feckless child this kind of behaviour might be acceptable, but he was too old to be still in his pyjamas in the street. And the look on his face told him that he saw nothing wrong with what he was doing. He was smiling and looked like he didn't have a care in the world. And I hated him for his un-selfconscious innocence.
I wanted to shout at him in the street, mocking him for his satorial mistake. I wished I had a camera with me, so I could have taken a photo of him to put up on this website, so the mocking of him might continue on a global scale. So if any of you saw him out and about you too could yell at him "Oi you! Slightly-too-old-to-be-wearing-pyjamas-in-the-street-boy".
It might be cruel in the short term. It might make him cry and question himself and begin to see the world in a different way and make him unable to express himself in the future without worrying what other people were thinking of him. But in the long run it would be good for him. Because he was too old to wear pyjamas in the street and if he wasn't stopped now, he might still be wearing them when he was 13 or 19 or 28 years old and then think of how bad he would look.
Pyjamas offer no protection against the harsh realities of the world, the slings and arrows that we have to contend with. I am speaking metaphorically, the only clothing that can contend with actual slings and arrows is armour and even then the joints are always vulnerable. Armour is impractical and expensive, but if he had at least been wearing a track suit and a T-shirt he would have been protected from the metaphorical slings and arrows, in this case an overweight 37 year old man who was a bit tetchy after a long drive and lack of sleep who envied the lad for his innocent happiness, a happiness that the man could never hope to recapture, because he had eaten from the tree of knowledge and a snake had told him that wearing pyjamas in the street if you were over 5 made you look stupid. Again the snake is a metaphor. I know that's probably obvious to you, but many Jews and Christians seem to take such ideas ridiculously literally.
And I did envy him. I wish I could wear my pyjamas in the street, but I can't. Firstly I don't have any pyjamas, though that could easily be rectified, but secondly I do not have the self-confidence to pull that off. The keyboardist from the Boomtown Rats (Johnny Fingers?) had more bravery than me, but apart from for him and some mad people, it is not the done thing.
I don't know what age it is that outside pyjamas become unacceptable. It's probably more about size and relative cuteness than about actual age. But if I had to pass a law about this and I think you should then I think the cut off age should be 5 for boys and 6 for girls (because it is important that boys have their innocence and fancy beaten out of them at a slightly earlier age). When girls get to about 17 it is actually OK for them to start wearing night-clothes in public again, but only in pubs and night-clubs as a flirtatious gesture which helps suggest they have loose sexual morality. Once they are over 25 then they have to stop doing this again. They are now no longer pretty and sweet enough to carry it off and begin to look merely desperate.
Those are the rules. Don't blame me. I didn't make them up. Well, I did, but they conform to general socially acceptable behaviour.
Laws are designed to destroy all that is beautiful in the world and are mainly created out of the envy of the elderly for the freedom of the young. A freedom that is now lost to them.
I will never again smile the smile of that pyjama-ed little boy.
