Mrs Harkaway took me shopping this morning. She’s brave that way.

Today’s issue: trousers. I have no trousers. Aside from some awesome American jeans from YDUK, I’m basically wandering around the place à la Somers. I had a nice pair of slightly flared grey trousers, but they have gradually and irreversibly gone through in what one can only refer to as the crotch, and there’s only so far one can take writer’s license before head waiters and mothers call the police. Even Appenzell is no longer prepared to suffer this sort of indignity any longer, after my visit last summer.

We blew through the conventional high street options – Gap, Reiss, and so on – in about nine seconds:

“No, I’m afraid we only have tapered trousers at the moment, that’s the style. Try these… Oh. No, sir. You look like a pipecleaner stuck in a banana. Maybe with the jacket? Oh! No, as it turns out I was wrong. Brenda, come and look at this! The gent looks like a standard lamp on skis! Innit marv’lous?”

Endlessly entertaining.

So finally we ended up in a shop off Oxford Street, and I wanted to leave immediately. I should have known it was going to get worse when I saw that one wall was lined with an open-topped fish tank featuring those ugly, violent fish which try to eat their reflections, and the shop itself was populated by incredibly gorgeous men in various shapes and sizes. I realised as well that half of them recognised me from the last time I was in and couldn’t find anything, and they knew it too and ran away, leaving me in the care of Syphilitic Pete.

No one actually called him Syphilitic Pete. They just called him Pete, but they stood a very long way away from him and there was none of the cheery backslapping and hugging which went on with all the other guys. He had a solid cocaine habit going, presumably to help with the agonising pain in his genitals, and his septum was about ready to give up the ghost. I don’t have such a problem with that – you can’t catch Dissolving Septum Syndrome – but he had some really charming chancres on his mitts which to my untutored eye looked like textbook Stage II Adolf & Friedrich. So the thing I absolutely did not want in any way was to put my immensely attractive limbs into any pantaloon-like item which he might have leaked onto.

“Try these, sweetie,” Mrs H said.

“Aaaaaagh!” I responded, hiding behind a fat bloke who was being winched into some narrow cowboy boots. It was no good. Blindness, alas, doesn’t come until Stage III. Pete shuffled over – his feet were giving him some grief, I should think; thankfully he was wearing black socks with his designer sandals, so it was impossible to tell if he was oozing through the toes. “Not make husband touch sticky disease man!” I mimed to Mrs H as soon as Pete turned his back, but she was in full shoptastic mode and already seeking out another woolly Petri dish of horror.

I did the only thing possible, under the circs. I’d already discarded taking the high line – “I’m sorry, Pete, you’re obviously a nice enough fella and someone loves you enough to make the horizontal samba with you, but let’s be honest between us lads, you’re covered in treponema pallidum and it’s off-putting to say the least.” No, it wouldn’t do. What if I mispronounced the Latin? So the only remaining option was deception. I scooted behind the curtain and made noises of what your German fellow with perfect logic calls Umkleiden – to clothe oneself around and about – which is to say I pretended to get changed.

“No,” I said, emerging with the soiled trousers held at arms’ length (sadly not having brought a pair of metal tongs and some latex gloves) “these won’t work.”

Mrs Harkaway had, in the mean time, accrued a small mountain of items. The rub was, I couldn’t know which might have been handled by the plague-bringer, and which were innocent. I gave the whole lot the fishy eye. We locked gazes, and I sensed a battle of wills coming on, but then I was rescued by Syphilitic Pete himself. He reached up and gave his head a scratch, and came away with a great hank of his own head in one crusty paw. Mrs H blenched a bit and suddenly the barrier to communication was removed. Information flowed as freely as wine at a publishing lunch like the one Andrea Wulf and I were at a couple of months ago which finished some time after nine and caused me to turn up sozzled at the offices of Al Jazeera. (Story for another day, and right painfully clottish I did feel, as well.)

“Escape is imperative!” Mrs H’s eyes told me.

“Disinfectant, too,” I replied plaintively, thinking that a chap might hope for swifter answer to his need than this, but she gave a decisive nod and let me know that all would soon be well. I would not be required to touch or be engulfed by the scabrous trousers of Syphilitic Pete. Why a lady of quality carries baking soda in her bag I have no idea, but the sudden explosive bubbling of the fish tank and the immediate imperative to rescue the ghastly inhabitants afforded us ample time to make a decorous exit.

So here I sit, my entire body, saving only my hands, which have already been well sluiced, awash in vile anti-bacterial toxins had from the local chemical & biological weapons depot.

The smell is greatly ameliorated by the Olive Branch gel we got from Lush last week, but still and all I feel as if I’m getting an all-body rub from an ’80s dentist. 

The really good news, however, is that my favourite clothes shop has just called to let me know that they have a new line in trousers which is exactly the same shape as last year’s, but in a slightly different fabric, and they are sending me two pairs which will replace the ones now sadly gusset-free. In other words, I get to wear the same comfy trousers for another year at least, and not contract Adolf & Friedrich’s Disease.

Happy Harkaway.

And now I have to go, because Mrs H is going to buff my toes for me to make up for taking so long to understand the danger, and all is right with the world.