The Sock Drawer.

A place of hope, honour, belief and faith. A place we yearn for in treacherous times, a beacon we turn to in times of need, in times of cold, wooden flooring in the winter. A place we all convince ourselves we can trust, yet subconsciously know , this is far from the truth.

Let us take, for example, a miserably drizzly November evening. You’re getting dressed, but you can already feel the cold…biting. You wrap up with multiple layers, squeezing into thick old jumpers. Lastly, you reach for the sock drawer. All you need now is a simple pair of thick, cotton socks, to keep your sensitive paws protected against the callous laminate flooring. Your hand delves into the assortment of repugnant fabrics. To your absolute disgust, your proffering hand is presented, not with a snug pair of new socks, but with a horrific assortment of old and new, with none in pairs. You may meander blindly through four or five different odd socks before finding that this approach is futile, and that all of your socks partners have been inconspicuously murdered or abducted -rendering the vast population of your socks widowed. At this point, you may attempt to harmlessly unite various random socks, which display what you judge to be ‘similar’ characteristics.

Don’t do it! 

To say this is a perilous route to navigate would be a crass understatement. Amongst some of the odd, age worn socks, you discover socks which definitely never belonged to you. Socks belonging to friends, family members, Boer war veterans, Gail from Corry and mediocre newsreaders populate the sock hostel. You soon realise that these haphazard monstrosities’ of socks could never realistically be integrated with one and other, retreating from the battle to fuse oddsocks in holy matrimony for at least another day or two.  

Having exhausted all other available opportunities to obtain a logical pair of socks from the overabundance that remained in the drawer, your final option is clear. One last plunge into the abyss of socks to, if God would permit it, acquire a pair of socks. Your hand forces its way through the creepers; through years and seasons, reaching back further and further in time as you go, the socks consuming more and more of your arm as you reach, and reach… 

Finally, a pair! Delightedly, you withdraw your tightly clasped hand to reveal the precious riches of your mission into the unknown.  You should have suspected it from the outset, yet the overwhelming feeling of a pair of socks in the palm of your hand was just too much to supress. You allow your fingers to unfurl about the bittersweet package, revealing, infuriatingly, a fully formed pair of matching trainer socks.  

The sock drawer is an archaic means by which to store your socks. In its design it is problematic – rarely categorized, it is a melting pot for socks of all purposes, lengths and materials. It has been well documented that the likes of Plato and Socrates wrote of their lament of their own sock drawers, thousands of years ago in their ancient philosophy. It has even been alleged that Problem fourteen of Jay-Z’s famous 99 was in fact the ludicrous nature of the sock drawer. Unfortunately nobody seems willing to tackle the on-going enigma of the sock drawer, such is its slapdash authority in the lives of us all – it seems we all let our sock drawers control us.