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In the mid-80s when I was at College in West London, the Student Union existed to hold functions which involved alcohol. One of these was the traditional Vicars and Tarts Disco where the blokes dressed as tarts (prostitutes) and the girls dressed as vicars. The ‘hilarious’ result was that burly rugby players would totter around in a short skirt, stockings, high heels, comedy breasts and a great deal of make-up while the women simply donned a black shirt and white collar and drank dangerous quantities of Tia Maria. I was game to take part and borrowed suitable clothing from a girlfriend, although I had to navigate through a potential minefield of a conversation which needed to travel from ‘I need to look like a prostitute’ to ‘may I borrow your clothes’.

We all had a lovely time at the disco, however the suspender belt that I had borrowed was horribly stretched beyond use so I was obliged to replace it. As a 20 year old Englishman I was awfully repressed and completely out of my depth. A sensible bloke would have apologised and given the cash to the girlfriend, while a louche Frenchman would have spent an enjoyable afternoon selecting underwear, as he smoked endless Gauloises and thumbed a slender volume of poetry.

I did neither, but instead went to a local department store in a cloud of embarrassment where I grabbed the most likely piece of ladies underwear and headed for the check-out at high speed. I ended up spending a small fortune on a contraption that was constructed from elastic and metal clips, that was the type of thing that your granny might possibly wear, although it would be the height of bad taste to ask her. In short it was a catastrophe and my soul was permanently scarred.

Fast forward twenty years and you’ll find me pondering on the ways of the world and the fact that my missus has to hand-wash her bras. It is an extraordinary fact that in this day and age women can’t just throw their smalls in the washing machine as they are built around a wire that has a nasty habit of coming loose and in the process will likely destroy your washing machine.

I vaguely recalled a television programme a few years ago about a pair of designers who tackled a series of projects including a bra that used a moulded support, rather than a wire, and as a result the bra could be machine washed. I happened to know that these same designers had worked on a motorcycle called the MuZ Skorpion, so it didn’t take me long to find that their company is called Seymour Powell (www.seymourpowell.co.uk) and after that it took a minute or two to find that the bra was called Bioform and that it had been developed for a company called Charnos. A bit more Googling informed me that Charnos had killed off the Bioform line, presumably because it was quite expensive, however it provided a web form for enquiries on its website. I fired off a question about outlets and had a reply within a couple of hours that led me to a distributor who had some stock at discounted prices, and a few days later a package arrived at my front door. The transaction was quick and painless and would have been nigh on impossible without the Internet and World Wide Web.

Or at least it would have been impossible for an Englishman. So thank you Vint Cerf, Paul Mockapetris and Tim Berners-Lee, you’ve turned me into an honorary Frenchman and that’s a novel Christmas present.

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