It was 10.30 on a weekday morning. Ms Twenty-something joined the supermarket queue with a desultory scratch of the florid flannel cupcakes that stretched across
her beam in a manner that suggested she might have enjoyed a few too many of the real thing.
She was not the first I’d spied and it was not the first time I’d wondered.
Since when did it become OK to go to Safeway – or indeed anywhere in public – in your PJs past the age of about six?
What does it say about a society where people are so lazy, so slovenly about their own appearance and so contemptuous of others that they can’t even bother to get dressed before leaving the house?
This very question is vexing the good burghers of Gisborne in New Zealand’s North Island, where one prominent local business leader called on the council to issue an edict confining pyjama-wearing patrons to bed.
But it really is the nanny state when we
come to a point where people need to be told when to put on their sleepwear and when to take it off.
What on earth would that mistress of manners June Dally-Watkins make of this?
Why, it isn’t even a question of etiquette so much as a basic distinction between functioning humans and sleep-walking zombies.
Some may say we have made our own beds with the increasing blurring of the line between sleepwear, leisurewear and daywear.
Personally, though, I blame the Bananas.
It was they who set the example for 24-hour wearing of jim-jams, leading an entire generation to regard sleepwear as a socially acceptable form of default clothing.
Wake up people. Bananas don’t really talk, either.
