Both exmonkey and I have noticed this: our jeans used to wear out at the crotch and now they wear out at the knees. Changing nappies, you see.
Cyril Connolly is supposed to have said ‘the pram in the hallway is the enemy of promise’ (although a little googling tells me his book was called Enemies of Promise and the quotation should go ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’). Maybe he should have written ‘the knee-hole in the trouser is the enemy of promise’, but then one wonders how many nappies Cyril changed himself.
Will have to track down Enemies of Promise, partly because Cyril Connolly is referred to a few times in the commuting book Notes from Overground by Tiresias, and it apparently contains other corkers like ‘whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising’. I like that. Reminds me a bit of my A-level history teacher Mr Hofton who one day skewered me with this withering remark: “Booth, are you really intelligent, or merely well-educated?”