Underwear Under There

Okay, I'm being upfront about this: this is going to be a post about my undergarments. I'll have some nice crochet pictures for you tomorrow or Friday, but today I have to write about the sorry state of my bloomers.

See, I had an appointment with a dermatologist today. In fact, Mr Gingerbread and I - being rather moley creatures - decided that we ought to have someone cast an eye on our markings. It's all part of being grown-up and taking responsibility for our health. We'd been avoiding doing it for a long time, as it involves stripping down to your unders and having a strange man look at bits of your body through a magnifying glass. This, many of you might agree, seems like a scene from a modern-day version of Dante's Inferno especially designed for women. There are bits of me I would prefer that no one saw, not even from a great distance and obscured by fog, so I'm less than enthusiastic about a total stranger eyeballing them at close range. In any case, we made a joint appointment so we wouldn't be able to wuss out.
And that appointment was this evening.

As the moment of our stripping approached, I discovered with horror that my underwear drawer is a bleak and joyless place. Many of my favourite knickers are a peculiar shade of porridge: the dull grey of careless washing at high heat. They're immensely comfortable, to be sure, but not the kind of pants you'd put on to, say, seduce someone. As I was rifling through a wad of tights (that's panty hose for American readers - bilingual, c'est moi) that had joined forces like some kind of hosiery-style Gordian knot or an orgy of octopussi, I also established that none of my underwear matches. And then I remembered a girl called Mary, friend of my college roommate Neasa, who liked to remind us at regular intervals that you should never leave the house without matching underwear because if you were run over by a bus and the ER doctors had to cut your clothing off, you (and your mother - or your parents' upbringing in general) would be severely judged by the nurses and doctors present. My mind boggles.  Imagine, if you will, the conversation going on while your battered body lies motionless on a gurney:
Doctor: Good Lord! This woman is wearing washed-out white knickers and a black bra!
Nurse: That's not all, doctor! The lace of the bra is ... ripped!
Paramedic: That's how we found her at the scene. We debated whether we should just leave her to bleed out.
Doctor: No, no. We took the Hippocratic Oath. We're obliged to save her and her substandard undergarments. But, nurse, get me a Victoria's Secret catalogue in here stat!

Or maybe not. But it's a frightening prospect, nonetheless.

Anyway, after much searching, I located underwear that looked reasonably similar and of the same vintage, and along with my suitably underbepanted husband, set off to be examined. Sadly, though, this tale of underwoe was cut short with the anticlimax of discovering that Mr G had got the dates mixed up: we turned up at the doctor's office to find it in darkness. So we have to re-schedule tomorrow.

I'm definitely going shopping for underwear before the next appointment, though.