Cargo pants offer pockets full of possibilities

Wait long enough and a favourite comes back in fashion, rejigged as ‘retro’. Take Youngest Child’s new cargo pants, and I will – as soon as she leaves them lying on her bedroom floor unguarded.

“Look,” she says. “Like my new trousers?” “I do! Combats, yay. Are they back in?” “Cargos,” corrects Youngest Child, using the latest nomenclature for those trousers so beloved of 90s girl bands from All Saints to TLC and comfort dressers everywhere.

I have so many questions for her. The first, as ever, involves cost.

“How much?”

“Guess,” she says.

“£2.” (I like to burst her bargain bubble.) “Just no.”

OK, “£12.”

“£12.99 down from £59.” That’s my girl. “This was the ONLY pair,” she says, killing my second question – “did they have any more?” My third: “Can I borrow them?” meets with a flat “No”, mollified by “But you could get your own from somewhere else – older people can wear them too.”

It’s OK, the pretties will come to me eventually, when skinny jeans come back in again and she does a wardrobe clear out.

“How many pockets?” I ask, pockets in women’s clothes being a big issue for me and related to my occasional desultory attempts to smash the patriarchy by stealth, buying ‘men’s’ clothes with their multiple pockets, superior fabrics and smaller price tags.

She does a count. “Six.”

“Nice.” You can never have too many pockets. And is that, whisper it, an elasticated waist? “But there’s no condom pocket,” she says. “Condom pocket?”

“The little one at the top, inside one of the bigger front waist pockets. My friend’s mum told me she and her friends used to call it that.”

“Ah clever, but I’m sure when Levi Strauss invented jeans he was not thinking condoms,” I say.

“Might have been,” she says, “how do you know?”

“Because it was for a pocket watch. Otherwise the cowboys would lose them off their waistcoats when they were jigging about on their horses riding the range.”

“OK mum,” she says. “You just do you.”