I have received several pairs of pyjamas as gifts from various well-meaning persons and all remain in a bottom drawer in preparation for my Great Pyjama and Undie Sale. When I decide to stage this event, interested parties will receive sufficient notice to allow them to save adequate funds to purchase a pair of unused Willems PJs.

When I was a pubescent teen, I had read in a seedy magazine that Marilyn Monroe actually slept naked. This revelation was deeply disturbing and had an adverse effect on my own sleep patterns for several years. I trace my distaste for sleepwear back to this time. In my sadly unhinged mind, I imagined that if I slept naked, then one night I would leap into bed and there, carmen lips pursed in anticipation of a night of sensual excess, would lie Marilyn.

It will come as no great surprise that this never occurred. Still, displaying more optimism than is healthy, I have persevered with my infrequent pyjama embargo over the years. Marilyn being replaced at varying intervals by more contemporary sex goddesses (including my fiancée), all of whom have shown a similar disinclination to materialise in my bed.

There are obvious disadvantages to sleeping sans PJs, one of these being the possibility of suffering frostbite to one's extremities on chill winter morns. Thus it is necessary to have a sweatshirt and tracksuit pants handy into which to slide when, at first light, you stumble from bed to bathroom.

Here's another point of male winter attire. "Real men" never have tops and bottoms that match. The bottom can come from a tracksuit but the top must be a sweatshirt bearing a reference to a football code, alcohol or an exotic port they once visited for five minutes. The crotch should also be level with the knees and give the appearance of having been designed to comfortably encase the genitalia of an elephant. This billowing space allows the wearer the luxury of being able to scratch his more intimate body parts at five-minute intervals and make such adjustments to same as he may deem necessary.

Track pants, appalling though they may be, enjoy an advantage over conventional winter pyjamas in having no fly. While a practical move, the installation of a fly in pyjamas raises the risk of social disaster to unacceptable levels.

Is there a man in the world who has not wandered into the kitchen one fine morning when your partner's family are gathered for breakfast to find that, instead of concentrating on their bacon and eggs, their eyes are focussed on your fly which in the course of your evening slumber has opened like the curtain at the Lyric Theatre at the beginning of Act One? Didn't think so.

Thus there were no pyjamas in evidence as I stumbled around in a 6:30am fog of half-sleep one recent morning. As I ironed my shirt, the reverse-cycle air conditioning was running at a politically correct 30 degrees and the atmosphere inside the apartment suited me perfectly.

I was in mid-iron when I turned my head and glanced out the back door and onto the courtyard below which fronts a small street. There, behind the high fence which I had thought was preserving my modesty, was a pair of eyes peering through the gap between the horizontal fence planking. I walked closer to the screen door and looked more closely. Attached to the eyes was a blonde head, a female blonde head, and it was looking through the fence at me! I was the victim of a Peeping Tomasina!

I shrieked and ran into the bedroom and peeked through the blinds. The head stayed for another ten seconds and then it was gone. I'd been violated, perved upon in the presumed sanctuary of my own home! It was almost enough to make me take to wearing pyjamas again.