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 entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Rants, The world of Andrew. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.