Trip to the shop has become one big pyjama party

I LOVE winter pyjamas. They are, in fact, by far my favourite thing to wear. As I love good manners more, I will never venture out my front gate wearing pyjamas.

And I can probably get away with it as I live fairly deep in the countryside. I can probably walk for kilometres without anybody seeing me, except for the neighbourhood watch. But that is another story altogether.

I do on occasion chase the bunnies from my vegetable garden and evict bats and frogs from the house while wearing my PJs, but I have to put on gumboots first and this only happens under the cover of very dark nights.

As I visit the city’s hospitals quite often, I am no stranger to seeing all sorts of people wearing a variety of sleeping gear, gowns and slippers. As long as they are not wearing those ridiculous gowns, where you can see their bum at the back, I am all for the sick and the injured wearing pyjamas anytime they want.

I am, however, disturbed by the recent plague of people thinking that it is OK to wear pyjamas while doing shopping and engaging with the unsuspecting public. It seems to me that this is becoming a rather disturbing “PE thing”.

I cannot recall ever seeing a person in their pyjamas doing their shopping at a Woolies in Cape Town. They would probably not let them in in any event. But then again pyjamas are not exactly appropriate clothes when faced with 40 days of torrential rain, so maybe it is a weather thing. But honestly – if you are going to go to all the trouble to drive to the store, get out of the car and fill a shopping basket – the least you can do is put on some decent clothes, even if you are only buying the newspaper.

As my ouma used to say: having good manners is not making other people feel uncomfortable. And, frankly, seeing people in the clothes they slept in makes me think of how the Ebola virus is spreading.

Even if it is not so, it implies that the wearer was too lazy to take a shower that morning after doing goodness-knows-what the previous evening. Yes, I am very much aware

I cannot recall ever seeing a person in their pyjamas doing their shopping at a Woolies in Cape Town

that there is something called “all-purpose wear”, but honestly – unless you are three – if it has dancing cows on it, it is pyjamas.

Just go to any shop on a weekend morning and you will see them. Grown women who think it is OK to wear pyjama pants – which are often covered in ridiculous cartoon motifs – and slippers going about their shopping as if it is the most natural thing in the world.

On one memorable occasion, I saw a woman in a polka-dot “onesie” going about her shopping. An old lady walked past her, turned around and said loudly: “Honestly, my dear. There really isn’t an excuse for this, unless you are the shop mascot.”

Uber-unstylish person that the onesie woman is, she thought it ap- propriate to show a rather unflattering and badly manicured middle finger to the old woman.

Now it starts to make sense to me why she had so much camomile tea in her shopping basket.

But, really, there is no excuse. Especially as you must know that a onesie is a piece of clothing with padded feet – this means that she wasn’t wearing shoes either.