Finding the perfect underpants — a brief history
Iam puzzled by my choice of underpants. Bear with me. I still find it indecent that men’s underpants are openly on sale. I would prefer them to be sold under darkened wrapper, as condoms used to be by the barber. ‘‘Was there anything else today, sir?’’
But no, underpants are wantonly displayed in shops so that both men and women can paw them, assess the cloth with a poulterer’s pinch of finger and thumb, test the heft of the waistband, the thickness of the doubly protective parts. (I’m sorry if you have not yet breakfasted, but I am here to tell it as it is.)
TWO months ago John Bolton wrote an article on The Hill, the leading politics website in Washington, warning against a Russian ‘‘October surprise’’. He suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin might suddenly cease military operations and declare a ceasefire — which would utterly snooker the Ukrainians.
As one of the hawks who talked George W. Bush into invading Iraq, he proved himself to be a bad and dangerous adviser: he invariably defaulted to the toughest military option.
Neither did he cover himself in glory in 201819 as the third of Donald Trump’s four highturnover National Security Advisers. He was the one who egged Trump on to break the treaty limiting Iran’s nuclear activities and reimpose sanctions. If the treaty is not revived and Iran gets nuclear weapons, he’s why.
John Bolton is, however, very useful in predicting what other tricky and ruthless people might do.
The way things looked back in July, a surprise Russian ceasefire in October was indeed a potential nightmare for Ukraine, and it still remained a plausible threat down to only about one week ago.
By midJuly the Russian offensive was stumbling to a halt on all fronts, but by then Moscow controlled about 20% of Ukraine’s territory (counting Crimea and the parts of eastern Ukraine that it had already seized in 2014). Moreover, Russia controlled almost all of Ukraine’s coast, leaving it only Odesa and a few satellite ports in the far west.
Time was when underpants were simply and indivisibly underpants. At infant school, around the time of Napoleon, we used to strip to our undies, boys and girls alike, to do vaguely calisthenic things in the school hall. And if you had looked around the hall as we transformed on instruction from curled up seeds, to seedlings, to plants that stretched for the ceiling — apart, that is, from the child who remained tightly coiled in the corner of the room refusing to germinate and who later developed some extraordinary psychological issues — you would have seen that every pair of knickers was as white as morning frost.
A few years later when I first started to play club cricket with men — though that, I realise with a shudder, is more than half a century ago — it became clear that men’s underpants were also universally white — or at least they had begun life that way. Men wisely gave them little
On the other hand, Russia’s army was exhausted and demoralised, and there was little hope that it would be able to make further new conquests in Ukraine. Whether these realities were clear to Russian President Vladimir Putin is unknown, but his old mates in the FSB (formerly KGB) would probably have been keeping him informed.
So, John Bolton calculated, Putin’s best option would be to engineer a ceasefire that freezes the battle lines where they are now. It would deprive the Ukrainians of an opportunity to launch their longpromised counteroffensive, leave a very big chunk of their country in Russian hands, and give Moscow time to rebuild its army.
Putin could easily pass this off as a victory, as it would give Russia lots more land and greatly weaken Ukraine. He thought. Their underwear was as uniform as blue serge was in communist China.
But we live in the capitalist West and the signature note of capitalism is creating needless needs then gratifying them. The means of doing so is advertising.
(In the early 1980s I travelled a little behind the Iron Curtain. It took me a while to realise that one cause of the sense of drabness was the absence of commercial advertising. ‘‘High above the gutter,’’ wrote Larkin, ‘‘a silver knife sinks into golden butter.’’ But not in communist Czechoslovakia, it didn’t. All you got there was gutter.)
When advertising first swung its attention on to men’s underpants it pulled the usual stunt. It associated the underpants with youth and happiness and sex. Men fell for the fallacy like autumn leaves. Suddenly there were almost as many varieties of underwear for men as there are for women.
I embraced the coloured could even claim credit for having acted to save many lives. And since he would never let the ceasefire turn into a formal peace settlement, he could easily restart the war once his armed forces were ready.
As for the Ukrainians, they would be left insisting that the war must continue because they haven’t recovered their territory yet, to which the rest of the world (including most of their current supporters) could and would have replied that there was no evidence that they could ever do that — that it was time to be ‘‘realistic’’ and save what they could from the wreckage.
It would also be quietly pointed out to Kyiv by European governments that all their voters are facing a long, hard winter with energy shortages and roaring inflation — but most of those difficulties would vanish if the shooting stopped and the underpant but remained a traditionalist in design, favouring what became known as the brief.
The newfangled boxer short, it seemed to me, had design flaws, some of which I shall not go into on the pages of a family newspaper, but one of which was the tendency to ruche and gather. I do not like my underwear to ruche and gather. I have, however, recently graduated from briefs to trunks. These stretch a little further down the thigh and offer welcome warmth in the cooler months. Whether I shall revert in summer I do not know, nor do I imagine that you greatly care.
A further innovation was the advent of visual designs: pictures of Mickey Mouse or racing cars; waistbands with prominent brand names. The purpose was not clear. Why put images where they would not be seen? It could hardly be to impress potential lovers; if one has reached the underpants sanctions on Russia were ended. Please don’t be ‘‘unreasonable’’.
They wouldn’t say outright that the flow of arms and money will slow or stop if the Ukrainians wouldn’t see reason, but you never have to say those things out loud. And in the end, Ukraine would have to give in.
That was John Bolton’s nightmare, and it was entirely credible in July. The only thing holding Putin back was the fond hope that he could still win more territory by keeping the fighting going. Once he had been disabused of that delusion, he was obviously going to go with Option B.
But now, suddenly, that option has been taken from Putin’s hands. The very rapid advances of Ukrainian forces in the past few days in the northeast, with Russian troops fleeing before them, may not be a decisive turning point in the war, but Putin could only declare a stage there is no pausing for aesthetic appreciation.
And yet the use of motifs works. I can testify to it myself, for it is the root of my puzzlement and this column.
A couple of years ago I went shopping for underpants and beheld a novelty pack of seven. They were plain and black except for the waistband, each of which was emblazoned with a different day of the week. Reader, I did not hesitate. I bought them on the spot.
I don’t know why. I had not reached the stage where I don’t know what day of the week it is. And if I had, a set of underpants would be no help. Nor did I mean to wear Monday pants on a Monday. Nor, emphatically, would I want to meet the sort of man who did. And yet I liked the things on sight.
So much so that I have since thrown out all previous underpants and bought two more packs of seven. My underwear drawer is now ceasefire when he still seemed to have the upper hand in the fighting.
Where does this leave the Ukrainians? Far better off than before, because an imposed ceasefireinplace was the biggest threat they faced. The temptation to push on and try to finish the war now will be strong, but they should think three times before giving in to it.
The flow of weapons from the West will continue, and their army will be far readier to launch a sustained and decisive offensive in the spring than it is now.
The Russian army might fall apart with just as few more hard knocks during the winter, but it might not — and a serious Ukrainian military setback would revive the threat of an imposed ceasefire. entirely hebdomadal. Every morning it’s a lucky dip. I plunge a hand blindly into the drawer, pull out a day and if it’s right I put it back. And the absurdity
TODAY is Thursday, September 15, the 258th day of 2022. There are 107 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1840 — The 310tonne barque Anna Watson arrives in Waitemata Harbour from the Bay of Islands, loaded with materials and staff representing Governor William Hobson, looking to establish a new settlement that Hobson had resolved to call ‘‘Auckland’’.
1867 — Fertilised trout ova brought in from Tasmania are placed in a breeding box in the Water of Leith.
1868 — Located in the Exchange, the Otago Museum opens. It opened on its present site in August 1877.
1916 — The Battle of FlersCourcelette, the third and final general offensive mounted by the British in the Battle of the Somme, begins with New Zealand suffering heavy casualties at Flers. The battle marked the first involvement at the Somme for the Canadian Corps, New Zealand Division and tanks of the Heavy Branch of the Machine Gun Corps.
1917 — Russia is proclaimed a republic by Alexander Kerensky, head of a provisional government.
1928 — Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin while studying influenza.
1935 — Nuremberg laws outlaw Jews and make the swastika the official flag of Germany.
1969 — New Zealand Steel begins production at Glenbrook, Waiuku, producing iron and steel from local ironsand (titanomagnetite). In recent times the plant has produced about 650,000 tonnes of steel a year. Glenbrook remains the only steel manufacturer in the world to use titanomagnetite sand as its source of iron.
1976 — More than 80 years of a regular passenger ferry service between Lyttelton and Wellington comes to an end with the final sailing of TEV Rangatira. The vessel served as a British troopship during the 1982 Falklands War, and after several renamings was eventually scrapped in Turkey in 2005.
1982 — As the Citizenship (Western Samoa) Act comes into force, Western Samoans lose their automatic right to New Zealand citizenship. However, all Western Samoans in the country were granted the right to citizenship.
1988 — The convictions of Lindy and Michael Chamberlain over the disappearance of their baby, Azaria, at Ayers Rock are quashed. pleases me. We are odd creatures.
1997 — Google.com is registered as a domain name.
1998 — United States president Bill Clinton ends a fiveday visit to New Zealand on a high note, declaring an end to the blanket ban on military exercises between the two countries imposed over New Zealand’s antinuclear stance.
2012 — The All Blacks defeat South Africa 2111 in a somewhat dour match marking the first international rugby test played at Dunedin’s new covered stadium. Of nine kicks at the goal, South Africa could convert only two. Another talking point was All Black captain Richie McCaw being hit by a flying elbow on the edge of a ruck by Springbok prop Dean Greyling; State Highway 6 between Haast and Hawea is closed to night traffic due to two major slips in the area following a period of heavy rain and a shallow 5.2magnitude earthquake in the area 10 days previously.
2015 — An explosion at a hazardous materials recycling business in Auckland kills one man and injures four others.
2018 — Archaeologists find the oldestknown brewery and remains of 13,000yearold beer in Haifa cave, Israel, belonging to nomadic Natufian people.