Sock Catastrophe

One of my fucking socks has a got a hole in it. This means that, although its fellow sock remains in pristine condition, I'm nevertheless going to have to bin both of them. What a tragic waste - the exact equivalent of the Indian custom of suttee, where an otherwise perfectly serviceable widow is chucked on to the funeral pyre along with her husband's corpse. The only other alternative is to saw off one of my feet, which I'm not prepared to do, because it would then render all my left-shoes redundant.

If both socks were designed to wear out concurrently, this situation would never have arisen, of course. But the fact of the matter is, one of them always goes first. Perhaps, then, rather than selling socks in pairs, stores should sell them in threes, the extra acting as a backup sock, able to be turned inside out, as required, so as to fit either the right or left foot. An additional benefit is that three-legged people, of whom there are a few in the world (and who, because of their scarcity, aren't usually catered for by the international sock conglomerates) would be able to buy matching socks without embarrassment.

Then again, the three-legged people are probably going to start bitching even more than the rest of us when one of their socks develops a hole, because they're now going to have to throw away three socks instead of two. So perhaps a better solution would be to sell socks singly. In any case, when you think about it, the concept of a "pair" of socks is deeply flawed, discriminating as it does against people such as Heather Mills-McCartney, Long John Silver, and, for that matter, anyone who's trodden on a land mine.

All of which makes me wonder about the legitimacy of that chain of stores called "The Sock Shop." If you go into one and try to buy a single sock, they'll often tell you to fuck off. Well fuck them, too. Unless they're prepared to rename themselves "The Socks Shop", they should be forced by Trading Standards only to sell single socks. Otherwise give these arseholes an inch and they'll take a mile.