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.