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Sock Myths
Got socks for Christmas? No matter; the sock monster
will soon pounce.
by A S H Smyth
Thursday, January 3, 2008
It is a banal paradox of human life that the gifts one needs
least are the ones everyone wants to give you.
You know how it is. Someone realises you like to read, so you get books.
I appreciate this doesn’t sound so bad, and up until you’re about 10, it’s
really not that much of a problem: you don’t have the money to buy your
own, and no real literary ‘taste’ to offend.
But as the years progress, the book-giving increases in inverse
proportion to your (lack of) need. If you were, for example, to pursue a
career as a literature professor or reviewer, more books would be
precisely the LAST thing you’d need (not least – you’d have thought this
was obvious! – because you can get books free and any others that
take your fancy you’ll just buy for yourself).
But since your love of books is pretty much all that people will know
about you (people are so complex, aren’t they?), books are pretty much
all people will buy you. Especially at Christmas, when everyone’s
imaginative powers are at a low ebb.
It’s not just books, of course. School-teachers will get ugly ties, against
all the evidence that they only really need 5 and already own at least
30. Boring secretaries will get staplers (you reap what you sow). Poets
will get notebooks… piles of ‘em. Incurable romantics will get anti-family
packs of condoms.
And, of course, we’ll all get socks.
This Christmas, my brother made the terrible mistake of mentioning that,
in January, he’d be off on a week’s skiing with the Officer Training Corps
(at the tax-payers’ expense, you understand). For this, my mother
reasoned, he would need extra-thick socks.
In between unwrapping a briquette of Post-It notes, two plastic-backed
spiral-bound notebooks, and my third copy of The QI Book of General
Ignorance,* I tried to keep tabs on just how many pairs he got. I think it
was 6, though possibly I have misremembered the sheer bulkiness of the
offending items. If they were thinner than they looked, then he could
easily have been into double figures...
Of course, the shameful, unspoken truth in all this is that, actually, most
of us DO need some new socks, every once in a while. For all the cruel
joking about them, they’re kind of a necessary evil: like mothers-in-law.
And since socks are hardly the kind of thing you’re going to save up for
and buy yourself, I suppose Christmas is as good a time as any for a
maternal resupply.
Question is, though, why do I need new socks every year? What the
deuce happened to the old ones?!
The answer, obviously, is single socks.
I have – quite literally – three bags full of single socks in my room. And
yes, thank you, I’ve spent some time (on several occasions) verifying
that none of them matches any other. This is, after all, why we are
taught to play that card-matching memory game as kids, surely?
Not content to rely on my own researches, I’ve often sought external
advice as to where, exactly, the bloody singletons might have gone.
Normally the kind of advice I get is along the lines of ‘I don’t know: why
don’t you try doing your own laundry?’ Which is a fair – if irrelevant and
illogical – point.
Personally, I’d always just assumed it was my brothers nicking them; but
why (the eternal question) would they – or anyone else – want only the
one sock? [Heaven forefend that this is actually the case; because then
the problem wouldn’t even be solved by my purchasing thousands of
identical pairs. No, then they could be stolen in pairs. Or, rather, in
endless matching singles.]
The only person I know who doesn’t lose any single socks is my father.
He uses safety pins to keep them together in pairs (which, though
obviously a bit OCD, does make them much easier to swipe).
The whole issue is so mind-bogglingly illogical that most people conclude
there must be something supernatural about it. Almost everyone has
some kind of theory to console themselves in the long dark December
mornings, as they wait for the annual parental air-drop.
Terry Pratchett, in his appropriately festive novel The Hogfather,
ascribes the problem unto The Eater of Socks (‘to the laundry!’), a sort
of stripey-snouted ant-eater kind of creature. Which is perfectly logical,
when set alongside the Hairloss Fairy, the Veruca Gnome and the Oh God
of Hangovers (the gods taketh away, but sadly they also giveth, too, on
occasion…).
In Family Guy, pater familiass Peter Griffin peers into the washing
machine, only to see a faun in the snow out back, running off with half
of one of his favourite pairs. This makes me laugh a lot, and is only what
C.S. Lewis deserves, the sanctimonious old git.
And Jerry Seinfeld apparently once suggested that socks are nothing
more than coat-hanger larvae. Accordingly, as you lose socks, your
cupboard mysteriously gains coathangers. Nice point, well made.
Amongst other mystical explanations, I repudiate the notion of ‘static
cling’: it doesn’t take much more than about 2 minutes of swanning
around in black tie (pretty much all I ever wear: like Jeff Goldblum, I find
it saves brain-power for other, more-important decisions) before
someone says ‘Oi, mate! You’ve got a sock on yer.’ More to the point,
there is no dryer in my house, and nothing gathers static just because it
spends three weeks in a basket in the cellar. Mould, praps; but no static.
How’s this for a theory? That washing machines create some kind of
vortex, and at a precise point one sock vanishes through (through what?
Just through. THROUGH. I’m not a scientist!). But then why, given the
propensity of any washing machine to break down as soon as it is shown
so much as a single Zambian coin with a hole in, does the damn thing not
simply block and/or regurgitate the single sock? Someone phone Steven
Hawking.**
Still, we’re onto something here, I feel. It’s gotta be the washing, innit?
Not only is there something inherently evil about the laundry (as any
small boy will attest); but there’s solid evidence, too, that socks cannot
disappear anywhere but during the laundry process.
Reflect: nomatter how many pairs of seriously ugly Christmas socks your
mum gave you over the years, and nomatter how long she had bought
them before December 25th, you never once opened the pack and found
one had gone, did you? Alas not. And if you left them in the drawer for a
year or so (you know, the drawer where you keep [sorry, kept] the
maroon corduroys and the stripey tank-top collection) would any of them
disappear? Would they buggery.
A Seffrican teaching colleague of mine once marched down to the
laundry to demand the return of (or apologies for) all his missing half-
pairs. Now, Pete Quinn is a burly man, with a head of blond curls that
make him look like the decidedly dangerous result of a threesome
between Achilles, a knife-sharpener, and one of the cherubs from the
Sistine chapel (yes, Achilles liked boys: what d’you mean, it wasn’t in the
movie?!). But notwithstanding his potentially-lethal ‘charm’, the majestic
African lady who ran the laundry informed him, point blank, that the
reason his socks were coming back on their lonesome was that he only
‘sent them down in ones’.
[I had a similar question viz. why my underpants had several name-tapes
on them, including one pair which famously has two on the same side
(and one on the other). But between Pete’s crackling fury and the
stubborn – not to say immovable – Patience Ngxxclickxxgxwengwngwe, I
decided I’d keep that question for another day.]
It cannot be denied that there’s a certain cause-and-effect logic at
work in the laundry lady’s answer. But if we only sent one sock to the
laundry then surely that’d mean the other sock would still be languishing
in my room, unwashed: at worst, this would culminate in a scenario
whereby I always had one clean sock and one dirty… but they’d MATCH.
Single socks are such a universal problem that some clown went to the
trouble of writing a book suggesting uses for them – http://www.
singlesocks.com/ and the US govt has a department dedicated to the
issue: http://www.funbureau.com/
Now, I’m still a little hungover from New Year, so I can’t really give over
any more grey cells to serious thought on this burning issue. But I’d be
very keen to know if anyone out there has cracked this riddle in his quiet
time.
So, here is The Lizard’s first Call For Papers on the disappearance of
single socks. Please send all suggestions to ash@lizardmagazine.com
The winning entry will receive an unmatched pair from mine own private
collection.
---
* I jest not.
** No, I don’t actually think he’ll tell us. But it’ll be a very cool
conversation, while his batteries last.
© lizardmagazine.com, 2008
Also by A S H Smyth:
Got socks for Christmas? No matter; the sock monster
will soon pounce.
by A S H Smyth
Thursday, January 3, 2008
It is a banal paradox of human life that the gifts one needs
least are the ones everyone wants to give you.
You know how it is. Someone realises you like to read, so you get books.
I appreciate this doesn’t sound so bad, and up until you’re about 10, it’s
really not that much of a problem: you don’t have the money to buy your
own, and no real literary ‘taste’ to offend.
But as the years progress, the book-giving increases in inverse
proportion to your (lack of) need. If you were, for example, to pursue a
career as a literature professor or reviewer, more books would be
precisely the LAST thing you’d need (not least – you’d have thought this
was obvious! – because you can get books free and any others that
take your fancy you’ll just buy for yourself).
But since your love of books is pretty much all that people will know
about you (people are so complex, aren’t they?), books are pretty much
all people will buy you. Especially at Christmas, when everyone’s
imaginative powers are at a low ebb.
It’s not just books, of course. School-teachers will get ugly ties, against
all the evidence that they only really need 5 and already own at least
30. Boring secretaries will get staplers (you reap what you sow). Poets
will get notebooks… piles of ‘em. Incurable romantics will get anti-family
packs of condoms.
And, of course, we’ll all get socks.
This Christmas, my brother made the terrible mistake of mentioning that,
in January, he’d be off on a week’s skiing with the Officer Training Corps
(at the tax-payers’ expense, you understand). For this, my mother
reasoned, he would need extra-thick socks.
In between unwrapping a briquette of Post-It notes, two plastic-backed
spiral-bound notebooks, and my third copy of The QI Book of General
Ignorance,* I tried to keep tabs on just how many pairs he got. I think it
was 6, though possibly I have misremembered the sheer bulkiness of the
offending items. If they were thinner than they looked, then he could
easily have been into double figures...
Of course, the shameful, unspoken truth in all this is that, actually, most
of us DO need some new socks, every once in a while. For all the cruel
joking about them, they’re kind of a necessary evil: like mothers-in-law.
And since socks are hardly the kind of thing you’re going to save up for
and buy yourself, I suppose Christmas is as good a time as any for a
maternal resupply.
Question is, though, why do I need new socks every year? What the
deuce happened to the old ones?!
The answer, obviously, is single socks.
I have – quite literally – three bags full of single socks in my room. And
yes, thank you, I’ve spent some time (on several occasions) verifying
that none of them matches any other. This is, after all, why we are
taught to play that card-matching memory game as kids, surely?
Not content to rely on my own researches, I’ve often sought external
advice as to where, exactly, the bloody singletons might have gone.
Normally the kind of advice I get is along the lines of ‘I don’t know: why
don’t you try doing your own laundry?’ Which is a fair – if irrelevant and
illogical – point.
Personally, I’d always just assumed it was my brothers nicking them; but
why (the eternal question) would they – or anyone else – want only the
one sock? [Heaven forefend that this is actually the case; because then
the problem wouldn’t even be solved by my purchasing thousands of
identical pairs. No, then they could be stolen in pairs. Or, rather, in
endless matching singles.]
The only person I know who doesn’t lose any single socks is my father.
He uses safety pins to keep them together in pairs (which, though
obviously a bit OCD, does make them much easier to swipe).
The whole issue is so mind-bogglingly illogical that most people conclude
there must be something supernatural about it. Almost everyone has
some kind of theory to console themselves in the long dark December
mornings, as they wait for the annual parental air-drop.
Terry Pratchett, in his appropriately festive novel The Hogfather,
ascribes the problem unto The Eater of Socks (‘to the laundry!’), a sort
of stripey-snouted ant-eater kind of creature. Which is perfectly logical,
when set alongside the Hairloss Fairy, the Veruca Gnome and the Oh God
of Hangovers (the gods taketh away, but sadly they also giveth, too, on
occasion…).
In Family Guy, pater familiass Peter Griffin peers into the washing
machine, only to see a faun in the snow out back, running off with half
of one of his favourite pairs. This makes me laugh a lot, and is only what
C.S. Lewis deserves, the sanctimonious old git.
And Jerry Seinfeld apparently once suggested that socks are nothing
more than coat-hanger larvae. Accordingly, as you lose socks, your
cupboard mysteriously gains coathangers. Nice point, well made.
Amongst other mystical explanations, I repudiate the notion of ‘static
cling’: it doesn’t take much more than about 2 minutes of swanning
around in black tie (pretty much all I ever wear: like Jeff Goldblum, I find
it saves brain-power for other, more-important decisions) before
someone says ‘Oi, mate! You’ve got a sock on yer.’ More to the point,
there is no dryer in my house, and nothing gathers static just because it
spends three weeks in a basket in the cellar. Mould, praps; but no static.
How’s this for a theory? That washing machines create some kind of
vortex, and at a precise point one sock vanishes through (through what?
Just through. THROUGH. I’m not a scientist!). But then why, given the
propensity of any washing machine to break down as soon as it is shown
so much as a single Zambian coin with a hole in, does the damn thing not
simply block and/or regurgitate the single sock? Someone phone Steven
Hawking.**
Still, we’re onto something here, I feel. It’s gotta be the washing, innit?
Not only is there something inherently evil about the laundry (as any
small boy will attest); but there’s solid evidence, too, that socks cannot
disappear anywhere but during the laundry process.
Reflect: nomatter how many pairs of seriously ugly Christmas socks your
mum gave you over the years, and nomatter how long she had bought
them before December 25th, you never once opened the pack and found
one had gone, did you? Alas not. And if you left them in the drawer for a
year or so (you know, the drawer where you keep [sorry, kept] the
maroon corduroys and the stripey tank-top collection) would any of them
disappear? Would they buggery.
A Seffrican teaching colleague of mine once marched down to the
laundry to demand the return of (or apologies for) all his missing half-
pairs. Now, Pete Quinn is a burly man, with a head of blond curls that
make him look like the decidedly dangerous result of a threesome
between Achilles, a knife-sharpener, and one of the cherubs from the
Sistine chapel (yes, Achilles liked boys: what d’you mean, it wasn’t in the
movie?!). But notwithstanding his potentially-lethal ‘charm’, the majestic
African lady who ran the laundry informed him, point blank, that the
reason his socks were coming back on their lonesome was that he only
‘sent them down in ones’.
[I had a similar question viz. why my underpants had several name-tapes
on them, including one pair which famously has two on the same side
(and one on the other). But between Pete’s crackling fury and the
stubborn – not to say immovable – Patience Ngxxclickxxgxwengwngwe, I
decided I’d keep that question for another day.]
It cannot be denied that there’s a certain cause-and-effect logic at
work in the laundry lady’s answer. But if we only sent one sock to the
laundry then surely that’d mean the other sock would still be languishing
in my room, unwashed: at worst, this would culminate in a scenario
whereby I always had one clean sock and one dirty… but they’d MATCH.
Single socks are such a universal problem that some clown went to the
trouble of writing a book suggesting uses for them – http://www.
singlesocks.com/ and the US govt has a department dedicated to the
issue: http://www.funbureau.com/
Now, I’m still a little hungover from New Year, so I can’t really give over
any more grey cells to serious thought on this burning issue. But I’d be
very keen to know if anyone out there has cracked this riddle in his quiet
time.
So, here is The Lizard’s first Call For Papers on the disappearance of
single socks. Please send all suggestions to ash@lizardmagazine.com
The winning entry will receive an unmatched pair from mine own private
collection.
---
* I jest not.
** No, I don’t actually think he’ll tell us. But it’ll be a very cool
conversation, while his batteries last.
© lizardmagazine.com, 2008
Also by A S H Smyth:
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