EVERY Christmas there's always a new variation on an old cartoon - the one about a man looking lost and bewildered in a ladies' lingerie department. Oh how we laugh at his incompetence, how we mock his ignorance of cup sizes and fastenings, slips, thongs and high leg briefs, his embarrassment about it all.

Not any more.

Suddenly, the slip is on the other foot. Or somewhere.

It was alright when the boys were little - give them a multi-pack of little underpants with Thomas the Tank Engine on the front and they were happy. But the world was simpler then too.

Then there was that Levis ad - remember it? When Nick Kamen stripped down to his boxers in the launderette while he waited for his jeans to wash. Suddenly men's underwear became a fashion item instead of a grey and sorry secret best hidden from the world.

The boys had boxer shorts - Arsenal ones just

like Colin Firth's in Fever Pitch, then progressed, more stylishly, to some with the Arsenal legend neatly embroidered Calvin Klein-like on the waistband - much in evidence when they leapt up and down cheering at a cup final.

But at some point, they grew up and I lost the plot, just as, men's underwear blossomed from baggy Y fronts and got interesting - but not, you understand, when seen from a mother's point of view.

Which is why a few years ago I found myself baffled and overwhelmed in the middle of Marks & Sparks menswear department.

Trunk or boxer? Slips or briefs? Cotton or cotton lycra? Buttons or terribly technical looking openings? (How do they...? No, best not think about it.)

And that's before you start on plain or patterned, boring or silly, multi-packs or something called Urban Survival. It has all become incredibly complex. And not really the sort of thing you can ask the nice M&S male assistants for advice about. Or that you ring the boys and talk about in a loud voice on the mobile - especially if they're with their mates in the pub.

And can somebody please tell me why M&S sell knickers on hangers? Are there men who dutifully hang up their boxers in the wardrobe? If so, I'm pretty sure I don't want to know them.

And that was only in M&S. Venture elsewhere on the High Street and everything gets even more complicated and expensive. Men's underwear, once coyly and carefully modelled in the back pages of mail order catalogues, is suddenly bursting out all over, larger than life at a poster site near you. Which all adds to the general happiness. Until it comes to what to buy for one's sons.

Anyway, then I read one of those statistics about how hopeless men are. It was something like a third of grown men still have their mothers buying their underwear.

Ridiculous, I thought. Those mothers should be ashamed of themselves. No wonder men are so hopeless if we let them get away with it.

Then I stopped. And thought about what I was doing. And I stopped worrying about boxers and briefs and buttons and slips, marched out of the men's department. And went and bought something for myself instead.

From now on, the boys can stop being a silly statistic - and buy their own underwear.

And I can go back to admiring Nick Kamen.