Go forth

How difficult is it, exactly, to make a pair of socks?

Obviously, as a man of manly manliness I don’t – and probably never will – have much experience of knitting, at least until you can easily get patterns for racing cars, spaceships and full scale models of Keira Knightley. But I’d wager that making a pair of socks is simpler than constructing, say, a flatscreen television. Or one of those cheese toastie machines that you buy, use constantly for a month until your insides have turned to butter, and then hide away in the back of a cupboard where it will stay unloved and unused for the next twenty-five years, awaiting the inevitable machine intelligence uprising when it’ll come back and toast your face off.

In fact, I suspect that socks are probably easier to make than most other items of clothing, barring possibly the g-string. They are tubes of wool (or selected synthetic alternatives), sealed at one end and with a bend in it. It’s not difficult. I’ve had many fine relationships with some nicely crafted socks that do the job perfectly well, fitting comfortably, keeping your feet warm and preventing your skin from being ground to a moist and bloody powder by the insides of your shoes.

Someone needs to show BHS how to make socks. Because the last pack that I bought seem to fail utterly at achieving the very basic requirements of sockiness.

First off, I’ve got size 11 feet. Not massive - I don’t have to wear clown shoes or anything - but not small either. You’ll struggle to push me over; like a Weeble, I’ll wobble but I won’t fall down. So naturally, I bought the socks marked ‘Sizes 9-12′. Stupid, stupid me. Because these socks are so tight they push all the blood out of my feet, making my eyeballs swell slightly every time I put them on. I end up looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall when he gets thrown out into the Mars atmosphere.

I have a friend who once tore a muscle in her shoulder when she was taking off a pair of boots - having tried to put these socks on I now know how she felt. You could sell them to the military - they’d form part of the G-suits that fighter pilots have to wear. 

They’d need a bit of work first, mind you, since there’s another major sock failure that they suffer from. The moment you try and wear them, they fall apart. If you wash them, they fall apart. I fear that were you to shout at them in despair and disappointment, they’d start explosively shedding bits of thread like a poodle with bubonic mange. The leggy bit (technical term) separates almost entirely from the heel leaving your ankle exposed in a way that would cause uproar in Victorian times. 

I think these socks must be the equivalent of the velcro quick-release trousers that male strippers wear. And I really don’t think there’s a huge market out there for male foot-fetish striptease artistes.

This is very sobering. Go and have a look before reading any further.

It’s difficult to think of a more stark way to demonstrate one side of the costs of the Iraq war/occupation/screw-up. If you’ve got sound on your computer, you’ll hear the gentle clicks that signify each death, like a manual typewriter putting a full-stop on the end of a person’s life. I’m a little disturbed that what this most reminds me of is the game Defcon, where similar points and expanding circles on a stylized map signify the impact of nuclear missiles.

Can you imagine, however, what this map would be like if it also included the deaths of Iraqi people? We’re talking estimates of between 600,000 and over a million so far. A proportion of these are ‘indirect’ (but no less important) deaths - if a hospital is destroyed, someone who might have lived will not now be able to get the necessary treatment, or if fresh water supplies are disrupted then diseases become prevalent.

Include these on the map, and that irregular tick of each death would become a cacophony: the sound of a swarm of insidious locusts. If you’ve ever seen time-lapse film of mould spores growing, I imagine that’s what the dots on the map would become like, growing and spreading until all the major cities and villages became clearly defined by the human cost of this war.

I don’t know what should be done about the situation in Iraq. I’m horrified by how people were mislead and lied to by the government as to the reasons for the war - that whole mess over the WMD claims. But the invasion cannot now be taken back. The Western world can’t just swoop in, oust a dictator and dismantle a corrupt government, and then disappear off again into the sunset expecting everything to revert to a happy ending - those are the actions of a superhero in a cheap child’s comic. Instead, this is something that is going to take years, decades, or more to resolve, whatever happens. And that map is going to keep on ticking away until that special consensual hallucination we call ’stability’ begins to develop.

There is a certain joy to be found in watching something be utterly destroyed.

Which I admit makes me sound worryingly like a Bond villain.

From here, which has many, many more.

So, watched Cloverfield last night the way I usually watch films: darkened room, cocooned in my bed and the isolation of a good pair of headphones.

It’d be easy to be glib and make cheap analogies - Godzilla in the style of The Blair Witch Project perhaps. But that would be a grave injustice. It’s a genuinely unsettling monster movie filmed Handicam-style from a first person perspective, presented as a real-time documentary of events as they happen; it feels like found footage rather than an orchestrated and directed Hollywood blockbuster. As a stylistic conceit it’s nothing new, but the careful handling of the format is a joy - flashbacks occur because the events being filmed are being recorded over a previously used tape, a perfectly natural way to inject human emotion into what is effectively a disaster film.

And it’s a hell of a disaster. The lo-fi, in-the-thick-of-it style is matched by some of the most impressive special effects I’ve seen, creating a level of reality that, at times, left me rattled. Inspiration (if you can call it that) has come from the citizen journalism and aftermath of 9/11 and other events - streets coated in dust and ash, the human impact and reactions. The internet has become filled with shaky videos of extraordinary and horrific happenings, a phenomenon that Cloverfield taps into. Children of Men’s kinetic camerawork is another touchstone, the dropping of cinematic gloss in favour of raw effect.

I’m gushing like a ten-year-old with a thesaurus, obviously. Cloverfield has really impressed me. I’m not sure if you could even call the film exciting in a conventional way - the level of true tension pushes it out of that realm, and the total lack of any tongue-in-cheekness that you’d typically find in this genre of movie solidifies the realism. It’s certainly not particularly gory either, sidestepping that pitfall in favour of more human but no less visceral fears. I don’t really want to talk about what actually happens in the film - the experience has to be enjoyed in its entirety.

My only worry is the inevitably inferior sequels that it will spawn. There’s no way they’ll be able to maintain the fresh style of the original; that feeling of watching something inherently new and different can’t be replicated. I’d be happy to be proven wrong though.

Were I the sort of person who bought vases to display the flowers plucked along the way as I skipped through the fields, I would buy this.

It reminds me somewhat of this lamp too – I like the idea that the top of a table can change from solid to an imaginary surface of water.