28 Days later…Day 52… Under-crackers…

Making adjustments…just be careful

I can see it start to become too much. It’s like a bad pair of underpants. Once you become aware of the discomfort, it just never leaves you for the rest of the day. People quickly become used to a situation no matter how difficult and they become weary of it. I’m like that with the aforementioned undergarment.

Men and women are so very different in all sorts of ways, but I venture to suggest that the under-cracker department, is one area of significant divergence. I can really only speak from personal experience, but it is a subject in an odd way that’s important to all of us, and one that we generally take for granted. 

It’s no secret that I was far from wealthy when I was a little chiseller and living in Ireland it rains a lot, so the ‘drying’ isn’t great. That combination of factors once placed me in a dreadful predicament. For those of you unfamiliar with the Irish phrase and small-talk opener, “great drying today” it is a reference to a warm, perhaps breezy day, when you can actually hang the washing out on the line to dry, without it getting re soaked before you have time to run out and take it back in again.

If you live in a Mediterranean climate, (Lucky Baxtard) you will of course have no true experience of having your mother scream at everyone to get the washing in, with a shriek of “The rain!” It’s not funny how many times you have to rehang washing out to dry in a single afternoon. If my Ma left you alone in the house and it rained while the washing was out, you might as well slap your own arse if you forgot to bring the washing in before she got home.

Anyway back to the point at hand which I was making in relation to being a working-class child in Dublin, back before we had tumble driers or radiators in the house. Bad drying meant a shortage of dry clothes, which when you’re short of a few quid to have extra, or spare clean clothes is an issue. It certainly became one for me specifically when I was eight years old, and was obliged to go commando or wear my older sisters kecks to school, as there were none of mine dry. Little boys back then wore little shorts, so commando wasn’t an option as my dangly bits would eventually flash one of the Christian brothers who thought us, and I didn’t need that sort of attention believe me.

Now to be fair, no one was going to see them or ever know about it, (until now) but the trouble was that I knew. I swear I nearly had a fit. I threw a little eight-year-old wobbler. But having a conniption wasn’t the same back then. If I pushed my luck, I’d not only have to wear the offending lady jocks, I’d get a clip around the ear and a reddened arse for my trouble so in the heal of the hunt, I went to school wearing my sisters keckers. It was the first and last time I tell you.

But as I was saying, men and women have very different pant challenges. I say pant as in the singular of pants, which for some bizarre reason Americans call trousers, but everyone knows pants are your smalls right? I can’t speak to the lady issues and quite frankly it might get either disturbing or creepy if I did, so I’ll stick to what I know, which with the one exception when I was eight, are men’s Jockeys.

Of course, over the years through lack of choice, accident, design or just plain fashion, I have had the pleasure and sometimes discomfort, of trying many different variations of this particular form of packaging. When I was a kid my Ma insisted on y-fronts. Lord knows why it was her preference, but I hated them. Structurally they are such a poor design and make that, which they are supposedly designed for…impossible. That little y shaped hole at the front, I mean seriously, even my eight year old little tiddler couldn’t be winkled out of there through the fly of any normal pair of trousers.

I hate y-fronts as they led to the pee-pee in the zipper incident of 1971. I’m still traumatised. That my mother, decided to invite the mothers from the two houses either side of us in to assist with the winkle extraction, is something that I will carry with me to my dying day. Zippers and chonklers have a long and murky history that most of us men would care to forget.

But like I say I moved on and over the years, I went through the tightey-whitey phase, the loose boxer phase, the tight legged boxer phase, high wasters and the loose crotch fit, all with their own distinct disadvantages. These days, I’ve sort of found a grove and stuck to it, but there is never a perfect fit when you are carrying a man bag that has a life of its own, when it comes to dressing to the left or right. Don’t mention the trouser fit, because unless they are tailored, dressing to either side is not necessarily something one has control over. The tight jean trend of the 70’s and 80’s really did us no favours. Which leads me on to the adjustment factor.

Oh yes, whether you’re a man or a woman, you’re familiar with the jiggler and to a lesser or greater extent, every man is guilty of a jiggle now and then. Sometimes it’s an adjustment jiggle, but other times it might just be a casual jiggle. We do have a fondness for a subconscious if not unconscious fondle every now and then.

If you have an adjustment emergency and they can happen, it’s best to find a discreet location to just get everything back into some level of control. But of course there are times when you get caught short and you have to play pocket billiards, while drawing as little attention to the offending issue as you can. If one is in a small group, let’s say in a business setting, especially if there are non scrotum carrying attendees present, and the need presents itself, then the discomfort can be quite distracting. It’s like an itch for the uninitiated. Not that it actually itches, I’d see a doctor if that’s occurring, but like an itch, it grows in your mind if you can’t actually attend to it.

There are also those moments where it’s ok. A group of male friends chatting in shorts by the Barbeque for example, won’t think twice about pocketing a hand for a not too subtle adjustment while swigging a beer with the other. At home on the sofa watching Netflix, or standing in the garden admiring your rose bushes, all perfectly acceptable self-fiddling opportunities, although you may find your wife disagrees. But you have to be careful.

If you get too relaxed or become accustomed to a little private rattle to make yourself more comfortable, such as in times of pandemic where no one can see you at home, that habit may come back to bite you when you return to civilisation. Remember lads, when it comes to property it’s location, location, location. When it comes to tweaking or correction of the nugget satchel, its discretion, discretion, discretion. Don’t relax the kacks too much just because you’re working from home for a while. Its OK to grow a beard, you’ll remember to shave again when this is all over, that’s like riding a bike. Bad habits are harder to shake…maybe shake was a bad choice of words in this instance but you get me… remember stay in, stay safe and stay discreet…

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