PYJAMAS

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 airplane and taxi and smog. I wasn't thinking straight. I was confused.

But everything changed in that one moment.

These pyjamas 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 to myself, as I pretended to watch Desperate Housewives with my wife. Why must I deny who I really am?

'Coming to bed?' she'd said, as the credits began to roll.