These are strange days, but I still have 26 pairs of socks.
Without wanting to lift a lid on my marriage, it would be fair to say that my inability to find or wear paired socks would rank quite high (third or fourth) in a list of Caroline’s frustrations. We’re not talking upright loo seats or failed bin emptying, but we are circling just below them. If we gave each other annual performance reviews, my sock regime would be marked under ‘could be even better’ or ‘areas to work on next year’.
It should be simple. I buy a load of socks which, once worn, each go through the laundry as a pair and should, you would think, each emerge in my clothes cupboard similarly paired. To be honest, for many years they did, but they were years during which I was generally excluded from the laundry process. In my new, right-on, mainly home-working, empty-nesting, non gender-stereotyping life, I have largely taken on responsibility for my own washing, since when my socks have become less predictable than a Donald Trump press conference. Much less.
It turns out that what a sock can get up to during a simple five phase operation (wear, wash, dry, pair and store) is breathtakingly wide ranging. If we start with the premise that one of them will be in the wickerwork basket, Newton’s second law (which predicts the behaviour of objects for which all existing forces are balanced) would seem to suggest that the other one would be there, too. Newton would be wrong. The other one will be anywhere other than in the wickerwork basket.
To establish what has happened, we need rather to study Chaos Theory, wherein chaotic systems are predictable for a while but then become increasingly random, a theory which might have been written specifically for my socks. We could go into detail about Jerk Systems and Infinite Dimensional Maps if we wanted to, but we might end by straying from the point, which is that the reason the other sock isn’t in the wickerwork basket, is because it has materialized a) in my cricket bag, b) in one of the pockets of my fleece, c) at the bottom of my bed or d) in a dog basket. The last example, of course, pushes back into issues of the psychology of ownership, but the others are more chaotic.
In my Christmas stocking this year, Father Christmas produced 6 pairs of beautifully decorated socks with motifs of little animals and seabirds on them, along with the hope that they would remain paired. So, for the first time in my life, I really tried to be a good guardian to them; after all, the fact that I managed to keep my two children pretty much paired until they left home shows that I can actually do these things. The pair that I love the most has albatrosses on them, so I tried to give them special treatment after their first outing, seeking them out as soon as the washing was dry. It was all to no avail. One albatross was in the wickerwork basket right enough, as I knew it would be, but the other one turned up three weeks later in the little pouch of my briefcase where I keep cables and chargers. I have no idea how it got there. Same with the buffalo. One of them was metaphorically roaming the wickerwork basket whilst the other turned out to be starting a new life in Union Road, Exeter.
Mankind, as I hope we are one day going to find out vis-à-vis the new Corona Virus, is nothing if not adaptable, so I recently gave up on the idea of keeping them together in the washing process, and simply got every single one of the 52 socks I possessed together on the kitchen table, and started to play pelmanism with them. It was a rewarding half hour, I have to say, with the rather spooky result that the 52 socks belonged to no less than 42 different pairs, meaning that, at the end of it all, I had 10 actual pairs and 32 erratic outliers. The inference of it all is, of course, that there are about 30 friendless socks trying to make a living in surprising places around the county.
I blame one or more of the dogs.
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