Droit de Seigneur

Last week, thanks to a brief moment of carelessness while climbing over a stile, I managed to tear the pocket of one of my jackets. Normally, I would simply discard the thing and buy a replacement. On this occasion, however, because the jacket in question was purchased some years ago at the now defunct Dunn & Co, and is therefore an historical artefact in its own right, I decided to have it repaired for the benefit of future generations. But whom to entrust with the responsibility of such as weighty task?

It so happens that my local dry-cleaner, an Italian with a highly-desirable daughter (long-legs, "well-stacked", looks to die for) has a sign above his establishment which boasts that, amongst other things, he is capable of "Invisible Repairs". This sounded to be what I was after, so, on Thursday, I handed the jacket over to said dry-cleaner, and asked for it to be both cleaned and restored to its former, pristine, un-torn glory. This morning, after an interval of six days, I retrieved the jacket. And, I have to tell you, he has done an amazing job on it. Indeed, even extremely close up, you can't see the stitching. In fact, the repairs are so invisible that, to the unskilled, intellectually inferior eye, the jacket pocket still looks ripped.

To achieve this sort of restoration requires both expertise and a smidgen of genius. I'll bet that my dry cleaner includes royalty amongst his clientele. Specifically, he works for emperors. The reason I'm pretty sure of this is because emperors tend to wear magic clothes that can only be seen by really intelligent people. To thick people, like those in the famous Hans Christian Andersen tale, the clothes are invisible.

Unfortunately, emperors have to take these thick people into account because they comprise the majority of the population. This means that, whenever an emperor accidentally tears his magic clothing, he can't have it repaired conventionally. If he ripped, say, the seat of his pants and had normal, "visible repairs" done, to the intellectually disadvantaged, it would look as if someone had simply sewn a square of fabric on to his bare arse. Consequently, he goes for "invisible repairs", as carried out by my dry-cleaner, which blend in with the surrounding material.

But why should my dry-cleaner decide that my clothes were fit for invisible repairs, too? There can only be one answer: He reckons that I am of royal blood. Next time I see him, therefore, I shall claim droit de seigneur and take the opportunity to give his daughter a fucking good seeing-to.