Consider socks, if you will. (Of course, if you won’t we’re stuffed from the off, you might as well go and do something else.)
They’re a really good ending to a leg, don’t you think?
The trouble with socks is the same trouble as with people generally, it all begins when you have two. Years ago at the end of the 60s I was teacher training. As it was the end of the sixties we had a maths lecture in which we were advised to ascertain that the child had embraced and understood ‘the twoness of two’. I cannot fully recall but I think it may have preceded the lecture in which the threeness of three was raised. All I can bring to mind was the awesome responsibility of indoctrinating the twoness of two and wondering how I was going to do that without irrevocably warping youthful sensibilities, or causing a riot. Why did I never merely think to examine my socks?
No one possessed of two feet and socks, which is, thankfully, most of us, would ever be in two minds about the twoness of two. Not for them the endless finger puppet play, tedious afternoons spent rolling out grey clay snakes, or runny watercolour paintings of two blue (and a bit of brown) blobs executed with a hog’s hair brush longer than the child’s arm. ‘This one is Mummy and that one is Daddy’s girlfriend, Guthrie, that Mummy ran off with.’ (This happens more often than you would think when you’re teaching and is no help with maths at all.)
It’s a little known fact that washing machines are capable of inducing time travel. The Doctor Who logo of the whirling Tardis, was probably subliminally inspired by a washing machine. Have you ever stared into the depths of the rinse and spin and wondered just what exactly is going on in there? Oh yes you have, if not at the time, you have retroactively, when subsequently retrieving and counting your socks. Here we are deeply in the embrace of the twoness of two. The rectitude of the pair. The joy of a game of two halves. Mummy loves Guthrie now.
Where do all the odd socks go?
You see, they must be somewhere.
Physics teaches us that you cannot create or destroy matter. You can change the form of it. So, seas to rain, calories to fat, washing powder to slime, socks to what?
It’s not the same as putting a paper hanky in your pocket in the wash. The hanky will indeed cease to exist as a hanky. Transmuted by powerful magic, molecules of it grip lovingly to a previously black cashmere-alike sweater, not only evenly distributed all over the surface but also woven into every twist of the yarn in a manner for which knitting wool manufacturers would give their research budgets.
Not so the sock. Whoever found sock fragments threaded through all other garments would be wearing very ancient socks indeed. Two thousand year old socks have emerged from peat bogs and glaciers still intact. One thing you can be sure of with socks; they disintegrate not, neither do they disperse, many particled upon the winds of fate. They hole. They hole easily upon the slightest provocation. My workout socks hole at the big toe and at the heel, just like the workout socks of anyone else. United we are a holey alliance. Divided we have only one sock. Still, however, wholly one sock. No matter how massive the hole in the toe or the heel or the bit where you grip it to heave, the rest of the sock remains attached. The non disintegratingness of socks is a quality, which, abstracted, could be profitably applied to other things. Log rafts, paper shopping bags, cheap toilet paper. All fated to fall hopelessly to bits at just exactly the time when you wish they would not. Not so the sock. They are either made of very special sock yarn with the tensile strength of spider webs or spun steel, which seems an unlikely expense for a sock, or the manner of their construction imparts to them such inbuilt toughness as to render them virtually indestructible. In which case you might wonder why our more important public buildings are not constructed in a similar shape. The President will now address the nation from the White Sock. Once more under the sonorous presence of Big Sock, parliament assembled. The opening ceremony of the Olympic games today took place today in a Sock.
Whatever the cause of their strength, socks are not prone to disintegration, yet in the common or domestic washing machine they vanish. Silently they steal away one by one, though never, obviously, one and then the other one of the same pair. So wither socks?
And wither they do. They also expand, exponentially, so that a sock that looked comfortably roomy and ruched on the display card will, after the first washing, not only fall down your leg the instant you put it on but will also fall down your leg, turn itself inside out over your shoe and attempt to trip you up and kill you should you venture down steps. Conversely the withering kind will shrink like the pure wool Fairisle tank top your auntie knitted for you in the seventies on every wash. The sock, a snug fit at first, proceeds through ‘a little grippy’ and ‘quite tight’ until it grabs onto your ankle the moment you squeeze your foot inside and will progressively strangulate your major arteries until your toes go purple, you lose the ability to bend your foot and the blood, congested, pools like a ring doughnut under the thinning skin. You will be forced to remove the sock under conditions of public humiliation or endure exploding legs up aisle five of the supermarket. (Celia and Guthrie having a disagreement over designer frying oils among the canned soup and beans.)
The oddity attending the far from odd incident of retrieving an odd number of soggy socks from the machine is the way in which the retriever minutely searches the empty washing machine drum for the missing footwear. It doesn’t matter how long you stare at the steel; the sock will not miraculously reappear. When sock pairing the dried articles it is also fruitless to keep sadly draping the oddster back on the radiator, you can do it all year, if you wish, the act of redraping will not materialise the lost sock.
For they have gone. To a better place. Paradise for socks is reached through the time travel vortex of the spinning washing machine drum. Stare intently to spot the tiny Tardis and possibly perceive a peep of cobalt blue sky. Advance an ear to the whirling drum door and catch the sigh of surf on a far distant beach. Here the oddsocks play all day. New arrivals swimming up to the beach are netted, hauled ashore and laid in rows on the shifting gold and silver sands to dry. Recovered and rested, they are dined, darned and dance all night under the coconut trees. Many months pass with mornings shuddering through the museum of corns and callouses, afternoons idling down from a crystal sky on a blast of miniature in-sock hot air ballooning and nights in a silent samba upon the shifting sands. In the winter they congregate in giant sock drawers ‘Shy gym sock W.L.T.M. nylon rugby sock, object passion.’
So the socks play, their heads no longer full of feet. Entropically unable to ennumerate further than one, the twoness of two too far away to count, they notice not that they are being hooked, harvested, unravelled and returned to our universe as long chain polymer molecules spinning into life in a nylon factory. Have you observed the process by which two liquids, swirled together, result in a thread of nylon? Did you believe it? Do you really think that if you put carbon, or burnt toast, as it’s sometimes called, in a beaker with alcohol, or a stiff gin as it’s also known and stir like crazy, you’ll actually get a pair of nylon stockings? Not on your polymer 6.6 you don’t. Not without the appearance in potentia of all the odd socks throughout history. (Celia stared at Guthrie dipping her toast in the gin again. As Guthrie stood there in one sock and underwear from the day before yesterday with her eyeballs revolving in different directions, Celia felt as if she was seeing her for the first time.)
It’s a producer’s conspiracy aimed at keeping us cowed as constant consumers. How often are socks on your shopping list? How many pairs do you buy in a year? How many feet have you got? Do socks ever go out of fashion?
Now it can be revealed that what you always suspected, is in fact, true. Washing machine manufacturers are in league with sock producers to keep us permanently purchasing an item which has never been known to wear out. This evil conspiracy is directly related to the cost of the sock. Socks are small and only come in twos. No one expects them to cost much. There is a limit that could be charged in even the swankiest shop for, say, super silk socks knitted on the needles of comely young sockistas in expensively tropical locations. And as for your supermarket purchase, who ever bought anything but the cheapest multipack, costing less than the price of an air freighted lettuce?
In the modern world socks are a grudge purchase. Not for us the delight of Pepys at his spun silk with gold clocks or the satisfaction of a Dr. Johnson at his stout woven hose. Socks are bottom of our shopping list, lower than corn plasters, zit ointment and drain cleaner. The only way to get us to buy them is to make them disappear.
And then, because nothing destroyed or created can be, to make them reappear again as socks.
So the circularity of the universe is maintained. The seasons proceed one after another. The day follows the night. The sock drawer is replenished and order is restored. (Hello, Doug? It’s me, I’m ringing to see how the children are, text me or ring me. Anytime. Oh, I should say, I’m in the bus shelter.)
So it is, forced to embrace the twoness of two we unwillingly purchase more footwear without ever experiencing the full joy of socks. Whoever ripped their new socks from the bag, hacked them from the display cardboard, tearing their fingernails, and bit into the plastic twinning hook, chipping a tooth with anything more than lukewarm enthusiasm? Did anyone over the age of three ever show off ‘my new socks’ or dance around the bedroom clutching a pair in paroxysms of delight?
So we find in this age of rampant consumerism that the promise of socks far outweighs the joy. (Hello, I’ve just got your message. Is it permanently off? Is it? Oh is she? Well I could have told you that. Don’t ever……okay, okay. Yes we can talk and sort something out. I’ve just done the school run, can I come and get you? I must go into work. Things are getting desperate. I’ve had to send the kids to school in odd socks, I can’t find the carpet cleaner, I think we’re out of sandwich bags and I don’t know what you use to get melted underpants off the iron.)
Socks are like the sparrows of our life, briefly alighting upon our feet they fly and, once flown are seen no more.
Underpants, however are like dogs, faithful to the end, slightly damp, never 100% clean and another story altogether. (Looking over the giant pile of files on his desk Douglas noticed that Arthur had great pecs and no pant line visible through his very fitted trousers and wondered, for the first time, how he managed it.)
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JaneLaverick.com – something for the weekend.