On the Escapee Tendencies of my Knickers

The Blue Pootle is aware that most people have a problem pertaining to socks. Socks vanish, or, to be more precise, one sock vanishes and the other always comes to the top of the sock drawer and stares accusingly at the lone sock owner.

I don't have that problem. My problems relate to my knickers. They don't seem to want to be my knickers. They want to leave and start a new life without me. I keep buying them and the darn things keep wandering off.

But it's worse when they return. Because they always find the most embarrassing method possible to achieve their homecoming. Two examples:

1. I was living in a flat and my washing machine broke down. My parents very kindly agreed to do my washing, and my father duly carried my clothes up and down six flights of stairs for a week or so. Lovely Dad. I should have guessed that my knickers would take the opportunity to make a bid for freedom.

A month later. I open my door to go to work and find a pair of my knickers looking at me. They had been placed on the floor outside my door, I'm assuming by some other resident in the block of flats. Obviously the knickers jumped from the washing pile and hung about for a month before someone found them. And the worst part is - that someone obviously worked out by some Sherlock Holmes Style Process Of Elimination that they were my knickers and left them for me to find. How? I just don't want to know.

2. Visiting a friend who was still living with her parents at the time. Had a good time. Had fun. Didn't keep as close an eye on my knickers as I should have, knowing their evil tendencies. A year passed before I returned to visit her again (still living with her parents).

On the third day of the visit we were having breakfast in the kitchen when my friend's father asked her to help him walk the dog. As soon as they had left her mother gave me a funny look. Then she reached into her shirt and pulled from her top pocket a pair of knickers. She gave them to me and said I had left them behind a year ago. That means she had been carrying them around for three days on the off-chance of returning them to me. It also means that the whole father/daughter walk the dog thing was probably an arranged diversion, which means he was in on it too.

And the worst part of that story is - they weren't even my knickers. But I was far too embarrassed to hand them back.