THE UNDERWEAR TRAP

We were sitting around having a cuppa after church, when the conversation among some of the men turned to the subject of underwear. One chap announcing he had just re-stocked his supply of underwear, saying it had been a difficult decision as the old underpants were still in reasonable condition, well, except for the fact the elastic was no longer up to the task, and he kept finding them falling down within his trousers.

To my surprise, the other men at the table, me included, shared similar stories about the difficulty of saying goodbye to a pair of ageing undies.

I imagine there are a few reasons for this difficulty. Being thrifty farmers, we know the value of a dollar, and it is rarely just a single pair of undies that are faulty. Underpants tend to be sold in packs, so if one pair is on the way out, you can expect several other pairs are in a similar state. You have probably heard the story about the frog being boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water, which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.

The All Saints Tatura church building and hall was closed on March 24. It will remain closed to parishioners and the community until Government and Diocese restrictions associated with the coronavirus pandemic are lifted. Many school halls, church buildings, cathedrals and other places where people meet to worship are empty. In my 16 years of church ministry in different contexts, I have always begun each Sunday by thanking God for the opportunity and freedom to meet together. I never once thought that this would change in a peaceful democratic country like Australia. These are exceptional times.

I once bought a pack of seven pairs of underwear. On the waistband the clever designers had embroidered Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., each pair emblazoned with a day of the week. It looked good and I didn’t give too much thought to it, but for the next four years I was tormented by the thought of having an accident and being found with ‘Monday’ on my underpants, when it was actually Thursday. My mother always told me to wear clean underwear in case I was in an accident. What was my mother thinking when she told me this? People are in accidents all the time and I’ve never read about the state of their underwear in any of the reports. Have you ever seen this in a newspaper? “A 25-year-old male driver was injured in a single-car rollover on the Bendigo-Murchison Road this morning after swerving to avoid a kangaroo. He suffered head injuries and a broken wrist. Police say he wasn’t wearing clean underwear at the time of the accident.”

Scoring.

In the 1960’s acclaimed author Donald Horne described Australia as the lucky country, but he did it very much tongue in cheek rather suggesting

Well since those days, the term has been used a fair bit, particularly by

However, I cannot help but see that we are indeed a lucky country and

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Well, that is the ‘underpants dilemma’. If the elastic snapped completely, it would be easy. We’d throw them out straightaway, but it’s not like one day they stay up, and the next day they fall down. It’s incremental. The elastic fails very gradually. At the time of this conversation, I was having the same problem, so was relieved to find that I was not alone.