I have a Twisted Side

It seems that you never stop finding things out about yourself. Here I am, in the prime of my life, stable, mature, no hidden talents left to discover, no secrets left in the closet, and suddenly I'm having to face up to that fact that I am deformed and may have been so for years. I just never knew, and nobody thought to tell me.

It's all about socks, you see, not the usenet type, but those silly little cotton or wool rags you wear on your feet to prevent leaving skid marks in your shoes. At least, that's what I think they're for, I've never really worked out exactly why I wear them, I was just taught so at an early age.

I have an odd-socks box. It is an old archive box, and in it I put the odd socks that are left over each time I empty the tumble drier and put the clothes away. Every now and then, when the sock drawer empties, I go through the odd-socks box and manage to put together a few more pairs. It's a simple enough system, and I was quite happy with it, until recently.

As part of the tidy-up in preparation for mending a leaking roof, I moved a stack of archive boxes, and was a little concerned to discover that two of them were full up with odd socks. I had, it seemed, archived my archive box a couple of times in the past. On a whim, I spread the contents of all three boxes out on the bed, and managed to put together a few pairs of socks, but I was still left with two and a half boxes full of unmatched socks. That is a lot of singletons.

And so I became intrigued with the puzzle of where the other two and a half boxes of socks could be. I did the normal things, tidying up the bedroom, again; lifting the bed and finding yet more socks underneath, most of which, I was amazed to find, did not match any of the socks in the three archive boxes, but added themselves to the collection. I now had three and a bit boxes labeled 'O-S', and was no closer to unraveling the mystery of where the missing socks were.

It is time for a small diversion into the strange world of transmitted knowledge, because everyone who finds themselves in my position and wonders who to ask must tread at least some of these paths. You need to find someone who you think might give you an answer. There are many such people, but a limited range of categories they fall into.

Firstly, and I choose this type of person for obvious reasons; the closest to an omniscient being that any of us are likely to encounter, is the mother.

"Mummy, why is the sky blue?"
"Because it's always been like it, now stop toying with your egg and eat it."

By way of a thought-experiment, let's put the question to the mummy.
"Where have all the missing socks gone when there are only odd ones left?"
"Don't ask me, you're the one who loses them. Go and tidy your room."

When is an answer not an answer? When it is the 'It just is' reply.

To be fair to mothers, the father-figure answer isn't very different in the overall result.

"Why do I have so many odd socks?"
"Ask your mother, she's in charge of the washing."

And in the same area of those who can never answer questions fully, let's add the religious group. They will always fall back on claiming that god (pick one, any one) made it so, and that to question him is unwise, shows lack of faith, is blasphemous, or in some of the more active religions, is grounds for a Jihad. I won't even consider putting the question to them, I'd just be advised to consider the lilies, or give thanks that both socks hadn't gone at the same time.

Close by, and equally unsatisfactory, are the politicians. Ask them any question with the merest hint of possible culpability, and they'll waste no time in claiming that one of the opposition parties is to blame. That's if they even answer the question in the first place.

"Why do I have so many odd socks?"
"Since coming to power, our party has been committed to doubling the expenditure on affordable footwear in real terms, and our target show that during the last three years, a real increase in bed-pan warmers has been achieved in every major hospital."

There is another major group of answerers that have to be mentioned, because they have always held themselves to be the fount of all knowledge; the very purpose of their existence is to further man's knowledge of all thing physical, and possible also immaterial, since there doesn't seem to be a word unphysical, which is what I would really have liked to use there. This group is, of course, the learned body, the academicians, the scientists.

(As an aside, I'm getting more and more confused about this rule I before E, except after C, because it seems to me that there are more exceptions to it than there are adherents. Height. Weight. I could go on.)

To the scientist, the sort of simple question we would really like to ask is anathema.

"Why do I have so many odd socks?"
"In any universe, where the number of socks tends towards infinity, the probability that a single sock should be matched precisely by another single sock tends in the inverse ratio. It is a wonder that a pair of socks can exist at all."

The law of entropy applies to matched items of footwear; nature, it seems, abhors a cosy relationship. This is why there are so few binary stars.

There is one final group who persist in claiming that they have all the answers, and these are probably the most dangerous of all, because to a certain type of mind, they are the most believable.

"The reason that you have so many odd socks is that there is a global conspiracy amongst clothing manufacturers to boost sales by means of built-in obsolescence. There have been several patents for everlasting socks that have been bought up and are now locked away in safes belonging to a few rich men. They want you to buy more socks, it's as simple as that."

I will give you a warning now, about the most extreme of these types of answerers, the ones who say "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you."

When you ask them why, they'll say something like "Because if they find out I've given one of their secrets away, they'll kill me for it, so I have to kill you as a simple act of self-defence."

So, after our little diversion, and after I've established by rigorous analysis and geometric logic that there is nobody reliable enough to answer the question, let's cut to the chase. I considered briefly the possibility that Little Petal was stealing them and selling them on a dubious website as willy-warmers, but a determined search of the internet showed that no such site existed. I even dismantled the filters on both the washing machine and tumble drier in case a few of the missing items were hiding in the machines, knowing that it was a futile exercise, but I had to eliminate the possibilities systematically, using tried and trusted empirical methods. (And yes, I looked behind the fridge).

I finally located my missing socks, in a couple of black plastic bin-bags over the road in my stores, where I had put them for use as rags when I worked on the cars or did other oily jobs. When I found the sacks, I immediately remembered putting them there, and why I had thrown them away in the first place. They all had the heel worn out of them.

So, my first question had been answered. I had such a large collection of odd socks because I had to throw half of them away. And, of course, that begged the next question. Why was I wearing out the heel of one sock, and not the other? Was this really a global conspiracy of textile companies after all? And why make one heel wear out before the other? That seemed very inefficient if the desired result was to increase sock sales, because for someone like me, with an obsession for keeping the odd socks in case the missing partner should turn up, spurious matches could sometimes occur.

Consider: you go to the shop and buy a pack of five pairs of socks, and after a few weeks have two pairs and three odd ones left. You go to the same shop and buy another pack of five socks, and a few weeks later have another three odd ones, some of which might have the same pattern as the first three odd socks, and so the need to go out and buy still more socks is diminished until those accidental pairs themselves become separated. The case for a conspiracy of devilishly clever business minds is weakened considerably by this simple observation. (And I might add, the case for almost every conspiracy similarly fails to hold together, no matter how sensational the claims might be.)

I had to embark on yet another investigation to answer the new question. What I did, over a period of a few weeks, was record in my diary every instance of taking off my socks and finding a hole in the heel of one of them. Yes, I know, this might seem a little obsessive, but sometimes there's no other way to get to the bottom of a mystery. And as far as obsessive goes, I've still got a long way to go before reaching 11:25, hit return.

What has worried me, at the end of all this, is the discovery that I always wear the heel out on the sock that is on my left foot. I never, in all the records, wrote down "pulled off a worn-out sock today from my right foot." It was always the left.

I've inspected both my feet thoroughly, not only with a mirror, but by using my digital camera with the self-timer setting to take snapshots of the soles and heels of my feet from all angles, and I can't see any difference. But it's there, I know it's there. I have the evidence, you see. Just not the reason why.