Ian McMillan: Bedroom farce that means I grin and bare it

I hope I'm not revealing too much (as it were) in a family newspaper when I tell you that I've not worn pyjamas for years. To be honest, I don't see the point of them. So, let me get this straight: you take

your suit off, and your tie, and your shirt, and your vest and your socks and your pants and you fold them up neatly and then you get another suit out of a drawer and you put it on before you get into bed? I don't get it.

As a lad, of course, I always wore pyjamas because having a bath and getting into your jimjams and your dressing gown was an essential part of the winding down process of the day. I had some that were blue and stripy, like a kind of prison uniform, and then I lobbied hard for some Man from Uncle ones because, in my head, I was Napoleon Solo and

somehow in the depths of my steaming imagination I thought they made me look more like him and, indeed, even further down in the said steaming depths I thought he actually wore them himself in the house he shared with Ilya Kuryakin.

There was a bit of a tussle with my mother who said they weren't sensible and they hadn't got a drawstring which meant they might fall down at inappropriate moments but eventually, with a few tears and a promise to wash up, I won her over, although she did draw the line at a Man from Uncle dressing gown. Oh well, you can't win 'em all.

As I got older, I realised that jimjams were ridiculous so as a

teenager I wore a T-shirt in bed, often one with a slogan that I'd had constructed at one of those places at the seaside that stuck letters on for you and charged you the equivalent of the national debt.

My favourite was a vast black one that I'd had done in a place in Los Angeles when I went on a Greyhound Bus trip as a long-haired student. It said "I have seen evening clouds loom over Arizona" and I thought it was the coolest thing ever created in the history of civilisation. The bored and tattooed bloke in the shop didn't agree. As he handed me the T-shirt I said, in my eager, puppyish way: "I've seen 'em, you know: I really have seen evening clouds loom over Arizona..."

He said, in a voice so laid back it took ages to amble out of his

throat: "You sound like you're from New Zealand, man. Do you know Dave?" I realised, as he said it, it would have made a better T-shirt slogan than mine.

I wore it for years, and the letters fell off one by one until in the end I was sleeping in a tattered garment that announced "I en eve loom ov zona" which sounds like the kind of thing visitors from Neptune

might say and which was, in its way, a cooler sentence than the original.

The one thing wrong with the T-shirt and its equivalent, the

nightshirt, is the cocoon effect, the mummy syndrome, the feeling of being trapped in a cloth prison in which you're doing solitary confinement every night. As you twist and turn in bed the shirt twists and turns with you, or against you, moving clockwise when you're

turning anti-clockwise and vice-versa until you dream that your mam is pulling your school tie tighter and tighter on your first day at

secondary school and you wake up gasping and spluttering.

The one concession I made to nightwear was a few years ago when I was persuaded to buy some pyjamas that had short trousers and which were meant to give more freedom to people like me who like a lack of

restriction as they zizz. I tried them on and I had to laugh: I looked like a schoolboy or a member of some obscure army.

Somehow, in a strange way, the short trousers looked even dafter than the long trousers. I put them back in the bag and never wore them again.

Now, though, as I get older, I wonder if I should think about investing in a pair. Bright red ones, maybe? They wouldn't induce sleep. Grown up Man from Uncle ones? Too post-modern. Camouflage? No, I'd never be able to find them in the drawer.

I'll stick with the skin for now, thanks. The skin and the smile.