My own trousers have never fallen down

Hello,

I have been quite absent here, my apologies. I have been working a lot.

Recently I have been thinking a lot about how much you have to tone down details from “real life” when you use them in fiction. Or not you, I suppose, me. I think my fiction is known for being funny and for people doing and saying kind of crazy things. But actually both these qualities are, I would argue, toned down as compared to “real life”, for the sake of writing something that reads as credible.

I don’t write autofiction or anything close to it. But I do take dialogue and so on from real life. And then I edit it and most of the editing is making things less crazy so they seem more real. So often, if I take a crazy detail from life I have to strip lots of details back from it so it feels believable.

There are great crazy things that have happened to me which I think are really funny and I would love to use in a story but I can’t because it would just seem fake. Once I was trying to meet someone in the train station. This was rush hour. Victorian Train station it was, and he made me come to meet him there because he “couldn’t use google maps” as he put it.

“It doesn’t work. The blue man. It doesn’t work,” he said.

We were on the phone and I was looking around for him, and then I rounded a corner and there he was. His trousers were down around his ankles. His boxers were totally bright white and he looked bewildered. (Which actually, you wouldn’t expect would you? The whiteness of the boxers, I mean. You’d expect someone in this situation to be wearing like tatty old pants full of holes. Not at all. These were pristine)

“What’s happened to the trousers?” I said, upon approach.

(I think I was trying to sound breezy and cheerful, perhaps so as not to contribute to the alarm of the whole thing.)

“I… I’ve lost my belt,” he said (very mournfully).

I’ve thought so much about that statement in the years since. The way it was supposed to serve as an explanation. I don’t think I know anyone else who’s belt is actually completely responsible for holding up their trousers, to the extent they otherwise fall to the floor. My own trousers have never fallen down.

And I’ve almost never seen it happen otherwise. Once at a party I was talking to someone and he bent down to get me a beer and (I can’t explain how I knew this) but I could tell from the second he started to bend down that his trousers were going to sort of half fall down and reveal his pants when they did. I knew this was going to happen but had no way to stop it. I also knew the pants were going to be apocalyptic, which in that case they were. The cotton body had sort of almost (but not quite) detached from the elastic “waistband” (which in fact sat sort of mid bum, as is the fashion in certain quarters) and so the trousers pulled down the cotton body, but the elastic remained steadfast. It kind of bisected his bum? If you picture the most unflattering way to frame a bum that you can, it was like that. Then when he stood up I was thinking: Well we both know now, that I saw your bum like that.

He passed me my beer, it was warm (unsurprisingly).

The conversation was strange after that, I felt like we knew each other far too well, as if he was a sibling I’d met again after a separation or something. I can’t think of other times when it’s gone like that, with trousers.

Anyway, in Victoria Station what followed is no less crazy. But I will leave it there, you get the picture.

I keep a document of all the good dialogue I hear out and about, to use in stories. And I’ve started keeping a document of these crazy situations, which are too crazy for stories too. I don’t know why. Maybe a coffee table book: “Crazy scenes” in several decades. Watch this space.