On December 3, an attempt by a 23-year-old man, John Marsey, to fry a slice of bread went alarmingly wrong. Within minutes, his kitchen was ablaze. Thankfully, however, Marsey and his cousin, Darren, were able to conjure up a makeshift fireblanket. They grabbed a pair of John’s mother’s size 18 to 20 M&S “big pants” from the washing basket and threw them on the raging pan .

“If they’d been my daughter Sarah’s skimpy knickers, they wouldn’t have done any good,” Mrs Marsey said, posing with her huge pants for a local news story. And, in that instant, she encapsulated the implacable moral, spiritual, political and, most importantly, practical superiority of big pants.

People, I’m going to lay this one right on the line, right here, right now: I’m pro big pants. Indeed, pace Mrs Marsey, I’m currently wearing a pair that could have put out the Great Fire of London at any point during the first 48 hours or so.

This is because I believe if you’re going to do something, you should do it well. If I backcomb my hair, I’m not going to stop until it’s fully 2ft above my head and has to be karate-chopped in the middle if I want to put a hat on. And if I’m going to wear pants, I’m going to wear something that actually contains my entire botty-bot – instead of just hanging around the middle area, scantily, supposedly sexily, like a gift ribbon on a slightly battered parcel.

Lovely readers, if I have distressed you with how much you have just learnt of my underwear predilections, then it is, I’m afraid, matched only by how distressed I have been to learn of the underwear predilections of others. In 2008, knickers are no longer a secret.

Pencil skirts, skin-tight jeans and leggings – they all allow us to witness an exact outline of the wearer’s pants; rather like “Geo-Phys” print-out on Time Team, but for undies.

And what these results tell us is that there is scarcely a woman in Britain wearing a pair of pants that actually fit her. Instead of having something that, sensibly and reassuringly, contains both the buttocks – what I would call a good pair of pants – they’re wearing little more than gluteal accessories, or arse-trinkets. They’re all in briefs, demi-briefs, bikinis, strings, midis, hi-legs or thongs.

These tight, elasticated, supposedly saucy partitions across the mid-derriere are, in terms of both comfort and aesthetics, as cruel as the partition between India and Pakistan. There is catastrophic physical displacement. Entire body parts are split asunder, and undertake vast migrations. With my own eyes, I have seen women walking around out there with anything between two and eight buttocks – and placed anywhere between the hip and the mid-thigh. This enforced deformity is not the fault of the pants. They are little guys, simply overwhelmed by the task that faces them. They are outnumbered. They are the Alamo. They are, indeed, often in terrible danger – many look like they’re on the verge of being absorbed by their owners. A&E departments must have had a few emergency admissions for “emergency admissions” in their time.

Women, this manner of underwear cannot be an act of sanity. Why are we starving our bottoms of the resources – like an extra metre of material – to stay comfortable? Why have we succumbed to pantorexia? It is, of course, all a symptom of women’s continuing, demented belief that, at any moment, they might face some snap inspection of their “total hotness,” and have to reveal their underwear to a baying crowd, possibly featuring George Clooney. In this respect, women have communally lost all reason. Ladies! On how many occasions in the past year have you needed to wear sexy pants? In other words, to break this right down, how many times this year have you suddenly, unexpectedly, had sex in a brightly lit room, with a hard-to-please erotic connoisseur? Exactly. On those kind of odds, you might just as well be keeping a backgammon board down there, to entertain a group of elderly ladies in the event of emergencies. It’s more likely to happen.

You know, when it comes to sex, you have to remember men are blessedly, almost serenely, laisser-faire creatures. Girls – THERE ARE MEN OUT THERE HAVING SEX WITH BICYCLES. Whether you wear sexy pants is neither here nor there to them. They’re really not that fussy. Remind yourself of this every day. For instant calmness, it’s better than meditation. Imagine if men indulged in similarly demented levels of needless overpreparation. If they did, they’d all have two tickets for a mini-break to Prague in their boxers, lest they come across a lady doing spot-checks on their levels of “total dreaminess”. As you may have noticed, men just aren’t doing that in their pants. Indeed, in this inclement weather, they’re barely keeping their genitals in there.

Of course, while ostensibly both a literally and figuratively small problem, in actuality, women’s tiny pants have massive ramifications for us as a nation. It cannot have gone unnoticed that our global power has waned in tandem with the waning of our pants. When women wore undergarments that extended from chin to toe, the sun never set on the British Empire. Now the average British woman could pack a week’s worth of pants into a matchbox, however, we have little more than dominion over the Bailiwick of Jersey, and the option to buy-to-let the Isle of Man.

All the good that women getting the vote has done has been undone by their constant struggle against their tiny, uncomfortable pants. How can 52 per cent of the population expect to win the War on Terror, if it can’t even sit down without wincing? Women, the first wave of feminism was burning our bras. The second wave, I devoutly hope, will be being able to put out fires with our big pants.

No more sins of the flesh-coloured pants

Do not, however, get me wrong here. While I eschew the modern tiny pant, I am no fan of the majority of modern big pants, either. Why do they all look so horrid? Numerous vintage lingerie websites reveal another possible world: bright teal French knickers in silk, ribbony bloomers, frilly cancan scanties and amazing satin shorts from the 1950s – all gorgeous, yet also able to contain fully what I refer to as my “better half”. Walk into M&S, however, and anything more capacious than a tea-bag looks horrible. And why? Because it’s all flesh-coloured. Flesh-coloured is awful. No one likes flesh-coloured. Flesh-coloured is bad coloured. It’s noticeable that nothing in the world, apart from big bras and pants, is flesh coloured. You never get flesh-coloured shoes, handbags, or mittens. No one would specify a “meaty beige” for a sofa. Or car. Or gloves. And yet, some unwritten rule seems to specify that all properly sized modern pants need to be the colour of an uncooked pork chop. When I finally get hold of the Tardis, I shall eschew all of time and space in favour of popping into John Lewis in 1952 and picking up some pants.

Hot news

The fact that I know about a pair of pants being used to put out a fire in Hartlepool reminds me of the eternal mystery of the Amusing Local News Story. How do these stories get out? Is it accidental? Is every regional branch of the emergency services unlucky enough to possess a gossipy person, who always lets these stories slip in the pub after a few Baileys?

Or is it that there is some “amusing local news story” press officer, whose job it is to ring the local paper every time that a man on his stag night is found handcuffed to a local monument, dressed as Bam Bam from The Flintstones? Either way, it’s comforting to know that if I ever get fired from The Times – possibly for quacking on about pants – there is one other job for which I am qualified.

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