**Unleash your inner pyjama-wearer

I am embarrassed because my wife has caught me. “What are you doing?” she says, moments after walking into the bedroom. She looks horrified. I had hoped she wouldn’t notice, that perhaps I could get away with this.
“I can explain!” I yell, desperately, but it is too late. She has seen me. She takes her wide eyes and walks into the bathroom, possibly to sit down and shake a bit.
I am wearing little pyjamas.
I didn’t mean to. It just happened.
I’d just returned from a few weeks away on the other side of the world, working. It had been a tough routine of constant flights, drab and dusty hotels, punishing early mornings and very late nights. Of long car journeys and bad fast food. Of throat-drying air conditioners and bone-chilling winds. But in the middle of it all…I found comfort. Comfort in the form of a free pair of slightly undersized cotton airline pyjamas. Pyjamas that I only put on, that first, fateful night, because I was a shallow, jetlagged husk of a man, who stank of aeroplane and taxi and smog. I wasn’t thinking straight. I was confused.
But everything changed in that one moment.
These pyjamas just felt good. They felt…right.
Yes, they were a little too small, but that night, I slept the sleep of the innocent. I was warm. Comforted. Protected. I was a tiny cotton ball, all wrapped up in a charcoal sleep suit and as my eyes opened the next morning, I realised…my eyes had been opened.
“Pyjamas are incredible,” I thought to myself. “Why don’t I always wear pyjamas?”
I wanted to scream it to the world! “I am Danny Wallace and I love wearing little pyjamas!” I wanted to text my friends! To ask them whether they, too, had discovered the delights of little pyjamas! To tell them there is no need to explain, that we could embark upon this journey together – that we could wear our little pyjamas with pride! Maybe it would just take me to show them!
But this, of course, was all through the freedom that travel brings. I was in a different country, in a different time zone. Anything seemed possible. The world was my oyster, and I would be in that oyster – a small and simple pearl bouncing happily around in a pair of cotton PJs.
As the trip had come to an end, however, a certain hollowness had begun to creep in. Because I knew that, for me at least, the world of pyjamas was soon to be over.
“But why?” I thought, as I pretended to watch Desperate Housewives with my wife. “Why must I deny who I really am?”
“Coming to bed?” she said, as the credits began to roll.
I nodded, silently, and then decided: tonight would be the night I’d test the waters. And 20 minutes later, I’m yelling, “I can explain!”
“Look,” she says, the next morning. “I don’t mind if you want to wear pyjamas. I just wish you’d given me some warning. It was a bit of a shock.”
I am still wearing them and eating a bowl of Coco Pops.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I promise it won’t happen again.”
But I know it will. Because I have become an addict. How could I have been blind to them all these years? Why had I not seen the signs earlier? My dad was virtually born in pyjamas. When did it become socially unacceptable for a man to wear formal nightwear? Have pyjamas gone the way of pipes and monocles? I’d look great, all dressed up in my pyjamas with a pipe and a couple of monocles! We all would!
Why, then, do they bring such shame upon us? Why do our womenfolk frown upon us so? Maybe they just need to see us in our pyjamas to realize the comfort, the joy, the pleasure they bring! Maybe they will want their own. And if they do, we should be kind. We should simply pat them, patronizingly, on their heads and say, “There is no need to explain.”
I keep my pyjamas on all day. It is my own kind of protest. “Maybe this is what I will do,” I think, as I wander around the house, liberated. “Maybe I will wear pyjamas during the day and change into more appropriate clothing when she gets home.” But I resent having to go underground with this.
At half past six, though, I get changed into jeans and a T-shirt.
My wife is a little late home. “Perhaps she’s stopped off for a drink with her friends,” I think. “To come to terms with things. Settle her nerves. I’ve come out of the closet, wearing a little pair of pyjamas, after all, and this kind of thing can have an effect on the unenlightened.”
When she arrives home, things are a little stilted.
“Hello,” I say.
“Hello,” she says.
She puts her bags down and gives me a kiss on the cheek.
“I just got a couple of microwave meals from M&S,” she says. “Is that OK?”
“That’s great,’ I say.
There’s an awkward moment.
I look in the bag.
She’s bought herself a little pair of pyjamas.
“I can explain!” she says.
“There is no need,” I say, patting her on the head. “There is no need.”