Socks

I'm going to keep this month's blog short. Primarily, because I'm starting work on a new book, and that's where I should be focusing, but also because I don't want to over egg this particular topic. After all, a long article about socks is a lot like a drunken Santa. Entertaining to begin with, but after the novelty wears off, it’s just a bit boring and slightly depressing. Effectively, you’re just watching a fat bearded man scratch and giggle to himself. 

Let me say, right from the off, that I have absolutely no qualms with wearing odd socks. None at all! And let me ask you this, why the devil should I? They’re effectively undergarments for my shoes. And, like all undergarment protectors, such as trousers, if I’m ever in a situation where I am taking them off, I’m normally pretty comfortable. This seems to really irritate people. I’m often asked how is it that I can’t organise a matching pair each day. If I was to provide a one word answer to this question, it would be laziness. I mean seriously, why extend the effort? After all I must have at least twenty pairs of socks. Yes, twenty. That’s forty socks. Each sock in its own unique stage of usage and cleaning. If I waited for one socks counterpart to arrive at the same stage of the wash-dry-wear-laundry basket-leave for two days-wash,  cycle, it could be weeks before it turned up. I’d probably have to have separate drawers to organise the whole affair. One draw for socks which were awaiting their companions, and another for those socks who’d already been re-united with their partner and were now waiting to snuggle with my feet. 

I can hear some of my dear readers tutting at my apparent stupidity. “Why”, they ask, “don’t you just wash your socks together? Then they’ll be ready to pair straight afterwards”. In order to address this question, I need to double back to the section above where I said I was lazy. Because in saying that I’m lazy, I’m only really telling half of the story. After all, if washing socks was so easy, laziness wouldn't be a problem. I’d put socks into the washer, I’d get them out, I’d wear them in their correct pairs. The problem however start with the idea, that this concept is possible. You do not put socks into a washing machine, and then get all of them out again. If you think this can be done, you are wrong. You are an idiot. The idea that socks go into a washing machine, and the same amount of socks come out again is a fallacy, dreamt up by idealists. Idealists who've clearly never done their own sock laundry. It slap-bam fails to take into account for the mini Bermuda triangle, swirly vortex that is my washing machine. A tiny wormhole to somewhere else in time and space. Twenty pairs go in, but, inexplicably, despite all the odds, only eighteen come out. That, for the mathematicians out there, is four fewer socks! Which, may I add, are never from the same pairs.  What’s equally mystifying is their reappearance in an entirely different un-sock-related wash two days later! I’m not sure how it happens but it does. I check the barrel of the washing machine each time I empty and fill a load. There’s nothing there, just the a glistening steel empty ring, smiling, smirking, plotting back at me. Then, when I’m washing my whites, right out of the blue, two pairs of coloured socks just re-appear. Zapped back into the troubled, soapy underbelly of my clothes purification device, fresh from some parallel dimension they were holidaying in for a few days. Obviously, there aren’t enough of them to spoil my whites outright. However, over time, it happens just enough to turn my whites, a slightly manky gray colour. 

I have another hypothesis. Something less from the realms of science fiction. Instead, spawned from a mind riddled with paranoia and boredom! It involves my house mate. Or if you did prefer my science fiction plot line, we can call him “The Washing Machine Goblin”. Either or is fine by me. Having lived with the Goblin for a year now, he knows the complex relationship I share with socks. He knows that as a man of thirty one, I have never bought a pair of sock (excluding football socks), in my life. If you’re asking, I receive bulk packs from my Mum on a twice annual basis. Once in the summer, again in the winter. This system, thus far, has never let me down, and by let me down I mean I’ve never been sock-less. Anyway, back to the main point. Knowing how rationed my socks sometimes become (particularly towards the end of a six month cycle), maybe, just maybe my housemate, a.k.a “The Washing Machine Goblin”, has started a deeply disturbing, cruel, psychological, frankly legendary practical joke. Every Saturday morning he casually mopes around the flat, posing as the most lackadaisical man who ever graced the planet, when in reality he’s a prankster mastermind. When I start my sock laundry, he’s casually sitting on the sofa, eating sardines from a can and watching Storage Hunters. Apart from the odor emitted by the sardines there’s nothing nefarious about this situation. Certainly nothing to cause suspicion. And so, I leave the kitchen. I tidy my room maybe? Or take a shower, more plausibly.  This is just the window he needs! His laziness was just a guise to lure me into leaving him alone with my washing. Whilst I’m gone, he creeps into the kitchen and stops the washing machine mid-cycle. To you or I stopping a wash mid-cycle would provide enough of a barrier to stop this prank dead in its tracks. But not for the Goblin. He’s a madman, a renegade, an anarchist! He roll’s with his six shooter off safety! So yes, he stops the washer mid-cycle.  Then he carefully selects four completely different socks and removes them from the machine. Why four, no one ever really knows, but always four! He hides them and returns to Storage Hunters and his canned fish. Then a few days later the process is reversed, soiling my whites, one tiny shade at a time.

I must admit this second hypothesis is unlikely. The only other possible reason my socks go missing is one that involves me being at fault. But given that this is the most likely, but least interesting, I’m going to ignore it. Instead, tonight, I’ll be setting traps for the Goblin.