Pants

My issues with underwear in Japan have been ongoing.

It's not very easy to buy knickers here - with hips my width - so losing them is extremely tiresome. Six months ago, the wind blew them away. Then a set of Borrowers stole some. I asked my mum to send me more, and she did: they disappeared too. A little bemused, I bought fifteen pairs when I was back in England for the summer - some of which were quite nice - and spent this morning running around the house screaming Why can't I find any bloody knickers again? at the top of my voice. I threw socks around in a hissy fit; I checked the laundry basket four times. I even climbed into my cupboard to see if they were hiding at the back somewhere. There wasn't a knicker to be found. I have spent six months convinced that I am so bad at doing laundry, my knickers actually vanish. Into thin air. Like hair elastics.

I just had a visit from the local Police.

I panicked, obviously. Somebody shows up at your house in a foreign language and flashes a badge at you like they do in the movies: you panic. I immediately got my Legal Alien card out and gave it to them, and then I apologised profusely for leaving cigarette butts outside my house, and then I spotted an empty wine bottle left next to the doormat and apologised for that too. Convinced that they were about to arrest me for being messy, I bowed three or four hundred times and said sorry as many times as I could and tried to flutter my eyelashes, unsuccessfully. They didn't understand me, and I didn't understand them. It was great fun, in a perverted, scary kind of way.

And then I noticed that they were both blushing.

"Your....." one of them managed to blurt out eventually. "Your underwear."
"My what?"
"Your underwear. We have your underwear."
Silence.
"What?"
"Your underwear. It's in Police Station."
"What's my underwear doing in the Police Station?"
"Somebody stole it. Been stealing it for long time. Did you notice?"
"Umm. No."
"You not notice?"
"Umm, maybe," I said, because what else could I say: I thought the washing machine was making them disappear and there were small people living under my floorboards?
"We have underwear as evidence now. You can come tomorrow and pick them all up."
Silence.
"Thankyou."
"We are very sorry for your underwear."
"Me too. Umm - who was it?"
"Bad man. He tell us. He is..." - and then they made the sign for handcuffs.

I don't know what's more worrying: that a stranger has been stealing my underwear; that it's being held as evidence in a Police Station; that I sleep without locking any of my doors or that I thought I had a magic washing machine and fairies.

But I do know one thing. When I go and pick it all up tomorrow, it had better be bloody clean.