The Strangest Autumn Ever...

Supposing I tried to write this post in the vein of an established genre?

Try for example, Hammer House of Horror. Lightning flashes, a red overlay floods across the outline of trees, and we hear the voice of Vincent Price speaking in his silken dry tones...

"It was, it seemed, just another autumn..."

No, too bloody. Autumn is golden orange and russet shades. Let's try a musical style, perhaps Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. Da-da-dah-dah da-dah, and in comes Richard Burton's spitfire-flying narrative style "No-one would have believed, as the summer faded quietly into Autumn, that we were being watched..."

No, too paranoid. Nobody's watching us, we're not some intergalactic soap-opera. Try something lighter. Derek and Clive.

"The strangest autumn ever, was when that stripper was staying at the club and used to do that trick opening a bottle of wine with her fanny. Every now and then, it would go slightly wrong, and she'd lose the cork. Me being an emergency plumber, like, I had to go down there and sort of get it out for her."

"Like you do."

No, that won't do either. There might be children reading these blogs. Actually, that's very unlikely, most children have far better things to do. There might be adults with the mental age of children reading this blog. Yes, that's a possibility, and I wouldn't want them to get ideas and throw away their corkscrews. They might hit someone as they spiraled out of the window. The corkscrews, I mean. Although I wouldn't put it past a stupid person to get anything wrong these days. Put out the rubbish, and then put out the rubbish.

I'll just have to tell it like it is, then. I'm seeing things from the perspective of a worm, or a mole, or at least, from a kneeling perspective, weeding out a couple of the top flowerbeds for a customer. I should have been digging out the lower beds with a fork and turning over the earth, but at lunchtime, wandering around a garden centre trying to get a sensible price for black weed-control cloth, I had a sudden searing pain in my right shoulder. I knew what it was, I'd had it before. Frozen shoulder, one of the great mysteries of modern life. I hadn't had it for several years, but once you've been touched by it you never forget it. I just couldn't understand why on that particular autumn lunchtime I should have been struck again.

Frozen shoulder feels much worse than it actually is, and the doctors can do very little to cure it, apart from massive cortisone injections into the shoulder, which I know for certain would bring on my infamous vagus nerve reaction. The best advice I had received in the past was to try and do something rather than immobilise the affected arm. So I opted for the easy money that afternoon. I was pulling out low ground-cover weeds amongst the Cyclamen just coming into bloom, and cutting down the Raspberry canes now that they had finished their crop. Or had they? I spotted half a dozen fresh berries on one cane, and lower down, fresh leaves sprouting from the base of several other plants. In amongst the Evening Primrose and Phlocks, I found Forget-me-nots still flowering, and underneath a small tree, two small blue flowers on a fresh stem of Honesty. Some of the plants just didn't know when to give up.

I knew when to stop, though. My shoulder, despite my taking things easy and working left-handed, was burning as though hot barbecue skewers had been driven into it. I drove home using my left hand and waited for it to ease. I went to bed and hoped that sleep would come and take me away from it all, but two competing sets of pain set in; if I eased the shoulder, a fierce pain developed in my elbow. If I moved the elbow to alleviate the ache, the shoulder flared up again. I tried a couple of Ibuprofen, and within twenty minutes had chilly feet and chattering teeth. Was it so cold that I was getting hypothermia? The symptoms seemed to match. A bowl of porridge, a hot bath, and half an hour huddled by the gas heater got me back into a more normal state, and I was able to go back to bed for a second attempt.

Thinking back, I had often had previous attacks of frozen shoulder in the autumn, when the cold and damp arrives. I have an old injury to that shoulder where, as a teenager on a motorbike with less brains than the Greaves Silverstone I was riding, I crashed on a bend and fractured the top of my arm where the two bones meet and form the socket for the shoulder. Although it healed quickly enough, I had several times since over-reached and momentarily dislocated the joint, and the autumn knew how to find a weak spot. Perhaps the unexpected double-blossoms I had seen that afternoon meant that this was a particularly potent autumn, one that we shall remember for many years to come.

The tabby cat came to lay on the duvet close to me. Cats seem to know when you're poorly, and think that climbing on top of you and kneading your chest or stomach with their paws while purring loudly will help. In a way, she does help. Overweight, as many spayed female tabbies are renowned for being, she has got me out of a tricky situation several times, when after having said "Stop pushing me out of bed, you fat bitch", I've been able to answer the "What did you call me?" with "I was talking to the cat."

Limiting Factors

Old habits die hard. I still keep looking at my life as an engineer might. I have been driving to and fro between home and Blandford Forum these past few days, visiting a couple of houses where I have been felling Leylandii, uprooting ivy, and putting in new fencing posts and panels. It ought to be a pleasant enough journey, fifteen miles each way through the beautiful rolling hills of North Dorset, with a choice of two roads to take, a high road and a low road.

The low road, as it nears Blandford, runs close to the trackbed of an old railway, lifted years ago now. It was called the Somerset and Dorset, and it was one of those cross-country routes destined to be closed because it did not fit into the vision of swift inter-city transport that British Rail, as they were called then, were entranced by. It didn't go to anywhere big or bustling, or come from anywhere important. It started down at Wimborne, in Dorset, some distance away from Poole, and ran to Bath, in Somerset, some distance away from Bristol. Now, the derelict hedges and earthworks run alongside the crowded country roads that I am trying to use to get around between home and jobs.

My limiting factor appears to be mobility. It has taken me forty minutes to travel the fifteen miles between home and Blandford, because of the holdups. The roads, both high and low, are too narrow for the heavy lorries that are traveling each way, and when two of them coming in opposite directions approach each other, they have to slow to a crawl in order to pass without either scraping each other, or scraping the houses and hedgerows either side of the road. Two spots on the two roads I can choose each have 20 mph limits on them to try and reduce the number of incidents where lorries and coaches have met each other in the past. And, of course, there are the ever-present tractors to dodge around or follow haplessly when the bends make overtaking impossible.

The railways, when they arrived after the Napoleonic wars, revolutionised this country. The narrow country roads had become clogged with stage coach and carrier traffic which, meeting in the lanes, were often forced to a crawl in order to try and squeeze past each other without causing damage either to the vehicles or to the houses and hedges either side. The rutted and potholed surfaces enforced a maximum speed limit without the need for cameras and policemen. In an effort to speed up the transportation of goods and passengers, some enterprising individuals opened toll roads, purpose built highways without the width restriction and poor surfaces, allowing higher average speeds to be achieved, but only by paying to use them. The system had only limited success, because the toll roads were scattered, and could only be reached by traveling through the free but impeded public roads.

And now the railways have shrunk to nothing but dim memories and small preserved examples, which can only be visited by traveling to them an these narrow, potholed, and overcrowded public roads. Paradoxically, these preserved railways have become very popular, and at least one of them has been extended so that visitors to it will soon be able to travel by train instead of by car to ride the Purbeck line.

The Somerset and Dorset, whose tree-lined relics I have been gazing longingly at from inside the car, features in the latest computer simulation, or game, let's not try and hide the fact that we are only playing. EA Games released Rail Simulator a few weeks ago, and it included half of the SDJR, or S&D, as the line was known, with a couple of steam engines to run along it from Bath to Templecombe. One of the scenarios in the game is called Swift and Delightful, although to most people sixty years ago, the Somerset and Dorset was known as the Slow and Dirty. The quirky initials did not help it to survive when the nationalised railway split itself up internally into regions. The S&D cut across two of them, causing a bit of a headache to the planners and namers, who nowadays we tend to call facilitators and enablers, and the simplest solution seemed to be to close it. Another small line with equally quirky initials, the Shropshire and Montgomeryshire, also closed, but again, mainly on 'economic' grounds, nothing to do with it being known as the S&M.

The railways just didn't make the sort of profit that private companies were able to make on the roads. Profit, for a government, means taxation, which is the life-blood of any party in power, and the railways had been sucked dry by the war and subsequent prevarication over whether to go for all electric, all diesel, or dirty old steam. I make this point about profit and taxation because it is obvious to me that the move towards charging motorists per mile in order to try and force, sorry, persuade them to forsake the roads for public transport is not going to revolutionise personal mobility in this country, certainly not in quite the same way as the coming of the railways did. And taking the case of someone like myself, public transport would not get me to and from my customers. Unless, of course, like the modern railway network believes, we all live in major conurbations conveniently close to the stations.

In a desperate move to try and modify the limiting factor on the motorways, the government this week formally declared the experiments with using the emergency hard shoulders of motorways as extra lanes a success. Modern cars, possibly more reliable than their counterparts of the fifties and sixties when the motorways were built, are far less likely to break down, so there is less need for an emergency lane to deal with problems of stationary vehicles. Let the lanes be used for moving vehicles instead, albeit at a reduced speed, as a concession to safety. More of this innovative (sic) thinking will follow. I can see that, in towns where the single or two-lane roads cannot be widened, one way of reducing the limiting factor on transportation will be to allow cars to use the pavements in busy periods. After all, we are a nation heading rapidly towards obesity, mainly because too many of us walk too little, so why not use that wasted space and create a few more happy smiling faces behind the steering wheels?

I'm not joking.

Putting the clock back

It's not long now; British Summer Time comes to an end, again. "Spring forwards, Fall back", goes the old saying which is supposed to help you remember which way the clock hands are going to go. Not that there are too many clocks with hands any more, just digits, and none of that metronomic ticking from the mantlepiece at Granny's house to remind you just how much longer it was going to be until you could leave and get back home to your toys and secret places in the garden. Time creeps at different paces in different places.

If I could turn back time...

If I could have anything, any scientific advancement, or any super power, I would want the ability to move through time, to visit the future, to explore the past. Sadly, it doesn't look as thought H G Wells managed to get all of his predictions right; we still are stuck in the present, the here-and-now where Johnson's foot keeps kicking the stone and eternally refuting Berkeley. "The second law of thermodynamics!" screams another school of thought, "says that all order must decay into chaos. We are condemned to death by entropy."

Is it true? Does the past flit silently off into a whirling mass of released energy which slowly and inexorably seeps away until the whole universe is just a level playing field with no more clusters of matter? Is life a desperate but ultimately futile gesture of defiance?

I can accept that time-travel as we popularly understand it has too many flaws and fallacies to be discoverable, even leaving aside the fallacy of killing one's grandfather, there is still the nightmare vision of the past being as uncertain as the future when too many interested parties are monkeying around with it for their own nefarious purposes. I'm not saying that all genius is evil,or that all of world history is controlled by conspiracies, but most of our great inventions have been driven forward by groups of men eager to make a profit, and if someone should manage to find a way of seeing forwards even a few hours into the future, the lottery is going to be their main target.

I would be happy if I could simply look backwards, and see what really happened in the Sunderland flying boat when the Duke of Kent died, or what happened to Irvine on the slopes of Everest. I accept that I would not be able to stand on the grassy knoll and shout "Duck!", just as I could not whisper into Scott's ear "Five men are too many." The past has happened, I would just like to see exactly what it was that happened.

When I started living away from home in Lincolnshire last year, I had the TV on in the hotel room for company, and noticed there was a spate of programs about undoing the ravages of time. Most of these programs involved plastic surgery to remove the fat and smooth out the wrinkles, causing me to writhe and cringe and change the channel. One of them, featuring the rather scary Doctor Una, focussed on turning back the body clock by slightly more natural means. Although I didn't watch more than a couple of her programs, it set me thinking: could I turn back time for myself?

Those of you who've followed my blog for these past eighteen months, or been interested enough to read back far enough, will know that I have fought a long struggle against my own greedy nature, and managed to shed a few pounds and lose a few inches. But has it really done me any good? Have I managed to turn back my body clock? How could I find out, without having to go through all the humilation that Doctor Una and Gillian McKeith put their subjects through?

I had to go and see the doctor a couple of days ago. I had trodden on a nail whilst clearing a corner of a garden, and couldn't remember when I had my last tetanus booster. I had been meaning to go and see the doctor anyway, because I had been developing strange pains in the little finger of my right hand, which I had assumed was caused by the stress of gripping and pulling brambles and nettles, but it was one of those things I accepted wasn't really serious enough to warrant a visit all on its own, although it has put me off doing too much typing lately. The nail through the sole of my shoe was another matter entirely.

The pains in the little finger he could say nothing about, other than if they got worse he ought to see me again. I had collected enough tetanus jabs in the past to not really need another booster. Was this his way of saying he didn't want to witness one of my vagus nerve attacks? I thanked him, and stood up to go, when he said "I'd just like to check your blood pressure while you're here, you were borderline when I last saw you a year ago."

I waited while he pumped up the cuff on my arm and listened with the stethoscope, before saying, and looking suitably impressed as he did so, "125 over 70. You won't get any better than that."

Yes, yes, yes, a result. I have, in some small way, managed to turn my clock back a little. It's official, I've got a doctor's note to prove it.

Alter Egos

I don't know what woke me, but I realised I was standing by my bed, feeling cold and shaking in the dark. There was a singing in my ears like wind in telephone wires. Pale light flitted through the room as clouds raced past, turning the moon on and off, and in a brief bright moment I saw that I was still in bed.

"There are two of me!" I exclaimed, staring at the darkened pillow where I still lay sleeping in shadow as the clouds obscured the moon again.

"I don't want to cause alarm," said a voice to my right, and it did just that, "but there are somewhat more than two of us."

I turned, staring at the dimness of the bedroom door, and as another ray of moonlight flared up like a lighthouse beam, saw that it was I, standing there, looking at me. And, as I glanced back to the pillow in the final flicker before the clouds snapped shut across the silver face outside, I saw that I was also still asleep, oblivious to the shock that I was now encountering.

"I can't put this any other way," I said from the doorway, "but we are in a lot of trouble."

"We?" I asked. "Because there's more than one of us? How so, will the government triple our tax bill?"

"Don't be quite so frivolous" I said dryly, motioning me to follow. "Money is the least of our worries at the moment. But government?" I laughed ironically, "Well, that, in a way, is all of our worries."

I was going to move to the doorway, but stopped, feeling my lip. It felt wet and sticky, and when I took my hand away and the moonlight re-appeared, I saw a dark stain on it. I tasted it.

"My nose is bleeding," I said, and looked at myself.

"We've just been punched in the face," I said. "Come on, before it gets worse."

"Who punched me?" I asked, moving now, following myself out into the darkened corridor.

"One of us," I answered, not looking back. At a determined pace, we passed through the open doorway into the large room. I moved out from behind myself just as the moonlight arrived, and stared at myself, huddled on the floor clutching my nose. Standing over me, snorting noisily like a horse beyond the finishing post, was myself, wild-eyed, manic-faced, waving my arms wildly.

I looked at myself, beside me, then at myself moaning on the floor, and said to myself "Why did you hit me?"

"I am in command here," I said, "I'll decide what questions are asked and what answers are given."

"I'm not like this!" I turned to myself beside me. "How did this happen?"

"I didn't say anything wrong," I moaned from the floor, "I didn't deserve that. I was trying to help."

"I will not be disobeyed," I screamed, waving my arms again, "and I will not be questioned. What is decided is decided, it doesn't need reviewing or approval by a committee. One word, one will, one war!"

"For my benefit," I said, trying to prevent the situation from rising to the boil again, "what exactly is the problem?"

"I think the problem is quite evident," I said beside me, "it is the solution that requires debate."

"Am I surrounded by talkative idiots?" I screamed, stamping the ground in a fury. "Must I repeat myself for every inattentive poltroon? There is only one solution, and I have the formula! Act, and act now! Prepare the Thousand-year Rite! "

I looked at myself as a fresh wave of moonlight rushed into the room, and saw that I had a small black moustache.

"But I shave," I said in bewilderment, feeling my upper lip. It was smooth and hairless. "And I do not comb my hair like that!"

I stared in horror as I recognised myself. I was Adolph Hitler.

I turned to myself and exclaimed "but Hitler has been dead for sixty years, has he not?"

"Did anyone see my body?" I shouted in excitement. "Did they? No, they did not! They saw a charred corpse. It could have been anybody, the city was full of charred corpses. The world wanted me dead, and when they were given a body and a plausible tale they swallowed it, pickled cabbage and all!"

I turned to myself where I lay on the floor, but I had recovered from the earlier beating and scampered quickly up and came to join me where I stood in the doorway beside myself.

"I think this is what is known as a cataclysmic schism," I said beside me. "It is rare, but not unknown. What I am not certain about, is what can be done about it. I need to look at some parts of a book I read some time ago."

"The book is not a book, it is a pamphlet called 'Spontaneous Cathartic Regression Technique," I said from the other side of me. "I was just describing how relevant it was to the current situation when I was brutally attacked."

"I do not need any quack-doctor hypotheses," I screamed, wagging a finger at the shivering self beside me. "I have Hans Horbiger's advice, and Himmler will have the Holy Quail. Marmite Tax Three!"

I turned to myself and said "How would this pamphlet help, if I were able to find it?"

"It would possibly describe what to do if the subject reacts inappropriately," I began to say but was interrupted as I screamed "I am not a subject! I am the new ruler of the age! All will bow to my command! I will rise again, and this time I will not go to Moscow, or let Goering loose with the medicine!"

I turned and went back into the corridor, lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves. The moon did not penetrate here, and I was forced to feel along the shelves one by one, searching with my fingertips for a slim pamphlet in a plain card cover, that I remembered seeing a few months ago when I chased a butterfly though the house. It came to me assertively, it seemed, the narrow spine projecting just a fraction further than the other books.

I hurried back into the room, into the moonlight, and said to myself "I have it, see!"

I took it from myself and examined it, reading out loud the title, and then the author, "Doctor Abraham Isaacs of the University of Zion, Fellow of the Institute of Uncommon Science, Philosopher at Arms to the Emperor Joshua Norton Foundation."

"A Jew!" I screamed, lunging forwards in a fit of rage and wresting the pamphlet from myself. "I will not be insulted by this loathsome arse-wipe of semitic lies! Where there's a Will there's a Whale! I will..."

And before my eyes, I suddenly writhed and contorted, twisting and thrusting the hand which gripped the pamphlet away from myself as I fell to the floor, splayed out in the moonlight like a drunken sailor. I started forwards, but I reached out and stopped me, saying hurriedly, "No, no, it is enough, just watch, and do not touch, on any account."

I turned to myself and saw that I was calm, almost triumphant, as I watched myself squirming on the floor like a slug that has blundered into salt. My outstretched hand was trying to distance the pamphlet from me, but as I curled up into a fetal position the paper and card came closer still, and as I folded into a smaller ball, so it seemed to grow around me.

There was a sudden cloud above, and when it moved away and let the moonlight in once more the floor was empty. I looked around the room, and then to myself, seeking an explanation, but as I looked, I faded with the moonlight's departure, and as I turned quickly back to myself, I too had gone.

The clouds raced past outside, the moonlight flickered beacon-like, and I waited for a long time, watching, breathing, listening, but I was quite alone.

This tale owes much to Stanislaw Lem. I could have kept quiet and dared you all to recognise it, but I must pay him the respect he is due; he was one of those writers who helped me see what a fascinating thing the mind can be. I would like to dedicate this story to the Society for Happy Endings, whom I understand are campaigning to have all children's books that do not have a happy ending burnt. Happy Kristalnacht to them.

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.