The heat-death of the universe

Beyond the Fringe, 1960⁹⁸

Some years ago, when I was rather hard up, I wanted to buy myself a new pair of trousers – but, being rather hard up, I was quite unable to buy myself a new pair. Until some very kind friend whispered into my earhole that if I looked sharp about it I could get myself quite a nice second-hand pair from the Sales Department of the London Passenger Transport Board Lost Property. Now before I accepted this interesting offer I got involved in a great deal of fastidious struggling with my inner soul, because I wasn’t very keen to assume the trousers which some lunatic had taken off on a train going eastbound towards Whitechapel.

However, after a great deal of moral contortion, I steeled myself to the alien crutch, and made my way towards the London Passenger Transport Board Lost Property Sales Department in Portman Square, praying as I did so, ‘Oh God, let them be dry-cleaned when I get there.’ And when I arrived there, you can imagine my pleasure and surprise when I found, instead of a tumbled heap of lunatics’ trousers, a very neat heap of brand new, bright-blue corduroy trousers. There were 400 of them! How can anyone lose 400 pairs of trousers on a train? I mean, it’s hard enough to lose a brown paper bag full of old orange peel when you really want to. And anyway, 400 men wearing no trousers would attract some sort of attention. No, it’s clearly part of a complex economic scheme on the part of the London Passenger Transport Board – a complex economic scheme along Galbraithian or Keynesian lines, presumably. So over now to the Economics Planning Division of the London Passenger Transport Board Ops Room:

‘All right, men. Operation Cerulean Trouser. Now, we are going to issue each one of you men with a brand new, bright blue pair of corduroy trousers. Your job will be to disperse to all parts of London, to empty railway carriages, and there to divest yourselves of these garments and leave them in horrid little heaps on the floors of the carriages concerned. Once the trousers have left your body, your job ends there, and I mean that! All right, now – are there any questions? Good – now, chins up and trousers down!’

And they disperse to places far out on the reaches of the Central Line. Places with unlikely names like Chipping Ongar; places presumably out on the Essex marshes, totally uninhabited except for a few rather rangy marsh birds mournfully pacing the primeval slime.

And there in the empty railway carriages they let themselves separately and individually into the empty compartments; and then, before they commit the final existential act of detrouserment, they do those little personal things which people sometimes do when they think they’re alone in railway carriages. Things like…things like smelling their own armpits.

It’s all part of the human condition, I suppose. Anyway, it’s quite possible they didn’t even take their trousers off in the compartments but made their way along the narrow corridor towards the lavatory at the end – that wonderful little room, where there’s that marvellous unpunctuated motto over the lavatory saying, ‘Gentlemen lift the seat.’ What exactly does this mean? Is it a sociological description – a definition of a gentleman which I can either take or leave? Or perhaps it’s a Loyal Toast? It could be a blunt military order…or an invitation to upper-class larceny…but anyway, willy-nilly, they strip stark naked; and then, nude – entirely nude, nude that is except for cellular underwear (for man is born free but everywhere is in cellular underwear) – they make their way back to headquarters through the chilly nocturnal streets of sleeping Whitechapel – 400 fleet-white figures in the night, their 800 horny feet pattering on the pavements and arousing small children from their slumbers in upstairs bedrooms. Children, who are soothed back into their sleep by their parents with the ancient words: ‘Turn your face to the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen trot by.’