I would like to make it clear that I am not normally the sort of person who irons his underpants. I'm not, you understand, doing this because of some obsessive need on my part to ensure that there are no wrinkles in my boxers before I leave the house, or a desire to iron my entire wardrobe uniformly or anything like that. I washed a pair last night and they are still not dry. They are not much dryer now that they were when I started ironing them, but is is an improvement. I would also like to add that anyone who does routinely iron their underpants need not worry. I would far rather be a person who routinely and confidently irons their underpants, happy in the knowledge that what they are doing makes all the sense in the world and probably bolstered by the misaprehension that everybody else irons their underpants as well ¹ than be the sort of person who irons their underpants once beacause they are damp and worries for the rest of the day about whether they are, as a result of this one decision, mutating into some sort of being from another dimension, where such behaviour is commonplace. In fact people who do iron their own underwear are probably ahead even further because these sort of people are, I would imagine, not in any event the sort of people who are about to go to bed when they realise they have no clean underwear for tomorrow. You are probably thinking from this that I must have laid out all of my clothes the night before, as I usually do, only to discover my error. I probably, at this precise moment in time, rank slightly lower in your eyes than the people who iron their underwear and have now become, by comparison, quite the social trendsetter you would like to be yourself. This is not the case, I assure you. I put my wallet in my underwear drawer at night reasoning, doubtless incorrectly, that no burgular would wish to rumage through my underwear to find my valuables. I would imagine that, in reality, burgulars are aware that everybody thinks this and therefore underwear drawers are the first places they go looking when in search of people's valuables. Fortunately for me this presumption does not prevent me from putting my wallet in my underwear drawer, otherwise I would now be telling you you that I am not normally the person who rumages around in my laundry basket for my cleanest smelling pair of underpants in order to have something to wear.

I suppose at this stage it is absolutely vital that I point out that this story is not about me. If I was the kind of person worth telling stories about I would not have expended my entire first paragraph telling you about underpants, mine or anybody else's. Well, perhaps I might have started with somebody else's underwear, if I wanted to make it absolutely clear that my house, no in fact my entire life, was so full of other people's underwear that to write so much as a short story about me without devoting a paragraph to the issue of other people's underwear would be a gross distortion of the truth. I am not that kind of person, nor do I especially wish to give the impression that I am. I'm not sure I know anyone who is that kind of person. John isn't, although I have no doubt that, if given the opportunity, he would happily portray himself as such. Perhaps, with that in mind, it is for the best that he, the person with the more exciting attitiude to other people's underwear, features heavily in this story whereas I, with no wish to make a major feature of his attitude to other people's underwear, am merely narrating the story.

Having said all that about underwear (perhaps more than was necessary, but it's there now) I think a moment spent discussing John's attitude to his own underwear would be instructive. You will never, even if you spend all night every night for six months hiding under his sofa, catch John ironing his underpants. This is not because he is the kind of person who always has a clean pair, nor is he the kind of person who would wear a dirty pair or indeed emerge from whoever's bedroom (or bathroom) he fell asleep in the previous evening without any underpants at all. It is entirely feasible he would get to the point of having no clean underwear and, assuming he became aware of this fact at a suitably late hour (despite the fact that John inclines towards hiding his valuables in a sealed plastic bag hidden in his u-bend, a fact which nearly flooded him out of his house once when he rememered only at the last minute), that he might wake up in the morning with damp underpants. In spite of all this he would never consider ironing an option. Ironing, as a means of drying underwear in a hurry, is, within the confines of the genre, a high-effort, low-impact option. It has only one real advantage and that is that it is relatively safe. John is not the sort of person for whom the phrase 'relatively safe' holds any special attraction. He would, in addition, be much drawn to an pant-drying option that was high-impact, low-effort. An option, for example, like sticking your pants under the grill. This is what John would do.

It was, I think, Wednesday. I'm a little sketchy on this particular point, but I don't think its all that important. If we get, at some later stage, to a part of the story where it suddenly becomes absolutely critical to the development of the narrative that you realise that it is, in fact, Friday, for example, then I will try and establish whether this particular day was a Wednesday after all, and we can work forwards from there. But let's say it was a Wednesday. There was a knock on John's door. The affects of knocking on John's door have, of late, been rather disimillar to the affects of knocking on the door of my house, for example, in that it rattles John's entire home. The main, or rather, the sole, reason for this is that John's door has for some years been attatched to a camper van. This is not to say that John brought his door with him from his previous home, as you might do with a telephone number or a favourite family member. It's simply that when John was at his previous address, the door that was then in his possession was attatched to a more tradditional brick structure. Since he acquired the camper can the door on the camper van has been, you see, John's door. I assume that it has always been attatched to the camper can, although I have no sure way of establishing this for certain. I don't think it's that important.

I can't fully remember a time when John didn't own the camper van, nor can I, or anyone else, John included, fully recall how it came into his posession. The general concensus is that he somehow acquired it in the manner of a stray cat, but obviously you can't acquire a stray camper van. There may well have been a bet at the beginning of the story somewhere. My vague recollection is that prior to the camper van, John lived in some sort of flat with a roommate who, either by careful calculation or by sheer luck on John's part, somehow contrived always to make John look smart, sensible and all-around good marriage material, which he never was and is never (so his closest friends, and indeed his parents, generally agree) likely to be. I don't know what happened to the roommate. He was never part of our social circle. We did attempt to integrate him when he first moved in but he was always distanced by his insistence that he spoke no English, a fact which seemed unable to hamper his success as a lecturer on the subject for the Open University. All this, of course, is not getting us anywhere fast. Generally speaking if you knock on John's door you rattle John's camper van. That was my point. John's friends, myself included, tend to engage in the pathetic business of endeavouring to knock as hard as possible in what I can only assume is some kind of machismo test, in order to rattle the camper van as significantly as possible, although it should be added that the harder you rattle the van the greater your chance of waking John and, therefore, getting a response, assuming that was what you wanted. It was fortunate then, that on this occasion, the knock having been rather feeble, John was awake anyway.

Now I wasn't there at the time and it hasn't been mentioned to me in any subsequent account, but I imagine John struck up a pose as he opened the door, on the basis that it might prove to be a woman on the other side. It was a useful aspect of the whole door knocking home shaking business for John that he could usually tell the gender, at least, of his potential visitor by the fact that anyone female was usually above the rather childish business of trying to bang his door as hard as possible, a feature which enabled him to have a unique, if limited, screening system for social callers. So when John opened the door he found, probably to his disappointment, that the person who had hit the door not very hard had done so not out by virtue of being female and above such behaviour, but by virtue of being Kevin.

You're probably tired of the whole business of exploring people's personalities via underpants idea by now. I, on the other hand, have found it a surprisingly effective way of explaining people to a total stranger without the awkward necessity of revealing anything true about them. So here is where Kevin stands. Kevin, like both John and myself, would not be above finding himself with a damp pair of pants in the morning. He is not, as John is, drawn by strange biological urges to anything that helpfully side-stepped the 'relatively safe' aspect of a pant-drying option. He is, however, every bit as taken with a low-effort high-impact alternative. He would grill his pants. Here, though, is where Kevin and John differ. John would succeed in grilling his pants with no after affects accept nicely dried pants that were probably not sufficiently heated to have a significant impact on his sperm count. Kevin would set fire to his pants. Having done this, Kevin would panic. Having panicked Kevin would do something that was not totally disastrous but at the very least mildly catastrophic. He would probably pull the grill tray out of the oven with his oven-gloves, drop it on the floor and burn the lino in his kitchen. This would then have to be replaced at a cost that was not unbearably extortionate but was a good deal more expensive than buying a new pair of underpants.

All of this I blame on Karen. Blame is the wrong word, of course. It's not her fault. It's merely that she is the principal cause, that's all. Karen is, or was, Kevin's girlfriend- until about three months ago. They met at school, Kevin was seventeen and Karen was sixteen but was, and has always since remained, in every sense the more mature of the two. She refuses to admit it but it is perfectly clear to everyone except her (and Kevin) that she regarded his unkempt appearance and unwashed hair as the hall-marks of a person who needs someone to recognise their true potential and, above all, make them comb their hair, or at least buy a comb. They had been together for eight years since and Karen had more or less moulded Kevin into a sensible and reliable human being who didn't set fire to stuff and reportedly did the washing up. This was good, except for the fact when they split, it became achingly clear that Karen's influence over those years had pulled Kevin forward but at the expense of him doing any specific maturing of his own. Left to his own devices Kevin responded in a manner generations of worldly scholars would have us believe his distant ancestors had found so effective when they were treated by the Romans the way Karen had treated Kevin, he had descended into the dark ages. To be fair, Karen hadn't deserted Kevin because she was being attacked all over Europe by various tribes of Germans, although it was not generally clear to their respective groups of friends quite why they two of them had split since their only statements on the subject had been quite clearly designed to muddy the waters rather than provide any sort of clarity at all and had indeed at times been sufficiently short of being any kind of sensible answer as to convince many within both camps that they were in fact not really listening at all and finding concentration very difficult because if they were absolutely honest they both missed each other and felt they had made a horrible mistake, which in some respects was very much how the Romans and Kevin's ancient ancestors had felt as well.

All of this had left Kevin in a state of not inconsiderable confusion about life in general. It would be unfair to paint him as the sort of person who routinely sets fire to stuff or gets otherwise caught up in the kind of complicated stories that make his friends give him a very particular look when he arrives in the pub bearing his usual expression because they know whatever he has to say is going to start up being funny and end up being so implausible they are no longer sure whether it is true or not. Kevin has, I believe, a job that requires him to wear a suit. Witnesses testify that he is generally thought of among his colleagues as being quite a sensible and reliable sort. It's just occasionally that he makes these errors of judgement that have crept increasingly into his daily life since his split with Karen.

So it was that he arrived at John's, well, footstool, on the morning of whatever day it was with an expression on his face that spoke quite clearly to John of one such misjudgement, and, more specifically, the trouble that would have to be undone as a result. You might well ask quite why John had been summoned on this occasion given that, if I have painted John as the kind of person who you would not automatically turn to if you wanted someone sensible and prac tical to dig your way out of a nasty hole for, I have done a good job. The answer to this question is that while Kevin had plenty of friends more reliable in such circumstances they were likely to suggest the kind of solution Kevin was unlikely to want to hear. Whereas John, a fellow devotee of the high-impact low-effort diet, was far more likely to suggest something that would either work spectacularly or go horribly wrong but would, in either event, involve comparatively little effort.

So here was the problem, as he related it to John. He had the birthday card. He had bought it five days in advance in order to give him time to post it sufficiently in advance of the big day to allow it to navigate the postal system on its way to the recipient. He even, and this can only have been a hangover from Karen, had stamps actually in a drawer. He showed John the stamped envelope the card was sealed in. John turned it over and over in his hands.

"I see you written the return address on the back" he remarked, casually. After a while he said

"Was it the only address you could remember?"

"It's the only one I've got written down anywhere" admitted Kevin, without any real shame.

"Maybe you should have written it on the front as well" suggested John helpfully "that stamp looks a little bit lonely in the corner there all by itself".

A telephone call, of course, would have sorted the whole mess out. But this had, as Kevin was well aware, two flaws. The first was the embarassment of having to admit to that he had lost the address, and do it in such a fashion which allowed no possibility for anyone to guess that Kevin had in reality thrown the address away. The second was that making the phone call would require finding the phone number. Kevin was reasonably sure that was still around somewhere, but didn't fancy the prospect of seaching his entire house only to discover that he was wrong. So he had brought the problem to John, who continued to turn the envelope over and over in his hands as he pondered it thoughtfully.

"I think" he said, allowing a pause sufficient to develop the impression that the thought he was due to announce was of some considerable magnitue, a technique only ever used by people who's thoughts are pointless and obvious, "that we're going to have difficulty persuading the post office to take this anywhere for us without some kind of destination to aim at."

He smiled the smile that was supposed to say 'no problem, I've virtually sorted this out for you already, that's how easy it is' but in reality severed only to communicate that he had spotted an opportunity to turn this simple problem into something immeasurably more complex

"We're going to have to deliver this ourselves".