ADPS

A major epidemic called ADPS,otherwise known as All Day Pyjama Syndrome has been sweeping Belfast for the past couple of years. Each year, sufferers have been increasing in large numbers. I notice around where I live, I see a lot of women out and about along the busy thoroughfare wearing furry slippers or UGG boots, pyjama bottoms, and bathrobes. Accessories include giant hoop earrings and a pram. Most of them are young mothers who are walking their children to school but I have also seen them out and about doing their grocery shopping at Tesco or socializing on the street. This style is not only limited to chaavy moms but their babyless coherts too. It's the new "Chav Style". Dontcha know?

I must admit that some Americans are guilty of this fashion crime as well. If it had to be any nationality, Americans would be the posterchild for slobby dressing. In America, you would spot one or two shopping at Safeway on a late night, but I have never seen so many in one area during the daytime as I do here! It's like a big slumber party out in the street! I'm not surprised that someone will catch on to this trend and design pyjama clothing for outdoor wear. I predict pyjamas will replace the ever popular white track suit soon enough. Pyjama Couture.

So many women in Belfast take their children to and from school while still dressed in their pyjamas that a headmaster has appealed to them to show some respect.

Joe McGuinness, principal of St Matthew’s primary in Short Strand, a Roman Catholic working-class enclave of East Belfast, was moved to action after seeing as many as 50mothers arriving at the school gates in their nightwear.

In a bulletin to parents, Mr McGuinness wrote: “Over recent months the number of adults leaving children at school and collecting children from school dressed in pyjamas has risen considerably.

“While it is not my position to insist on what people wear, or don’t, I feel that arriving at the school in pyjamas is disrespectful to the school and a bad example is set to children.”

Mothers in pyjamas on the school run prove codes that once governed how we dressed in the morning have all but disappeared

Women walking round Belfast estates in all-day pyjama gear is a phenomenon that has been well documented by Robin Livingstone, a columnist in the Andersonstown News, but until now it has been confined to the west of the city.

Mr Livingstone said that he first identified All Day Pyjama Syndrome (ADPS) in 2003. He knows a student at the Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education who is writing a dissertation on the subject.

The women are colloquially known as “pyjama mamas” or “Millies”. Their pyjama ensembles are often complemented by large, gold hoop earrings known as “budgies” – because such cage birds could swing from them. They also sport “scrunchies” to create the “Turf Lodge facelift”, in which the hair is scraped so tightly to the back of the head that it pulls the facial skin taut.

There is even a dress hierarchy among those suffering from APDS: the wearing of silk-effect, baggy pyjamas with fluffy, mule-type slippers contrasts, for example, with the traditional dressing gown and hair rollers.

Mr McGuinness told the Andsersonstown News: “There used to be about 15 to 20 pyjama-wearing parents, but there are anything up to 50 now, and they are all women. People don’t go to see a solicitor, bank manager or doctor dressed in pyjamas, so why do they think it’s OK to drop their children off at school dressed like that? It’s about respect and setting children a bad example.

“There is an old word called slovenliness, which means messy and lazy. I think this can be applied to people who spend the day dressed in pyjamas.”

The Andersonstown News supported Mr McGuinness’s stand in an editorial. “Quite frankly, we believe that Mr McGuinness is absolutely right and we wish other teachers would follow his lead,” the newspaper said.

“Those people all over the city – and they are almost exclusively women – who wear pyjamas as they go about their daily business will argue it is their right to do as they choose and they are breaking no law. Perhaps they do not care what the rest of us think. If so, then they should seriously ask themselves what message they are handing to their children.” -David Sharrock, Times Online