Call me boring, but I like to have a system regarding the colour of my socks. In the old days, I used to wear odd socks with a sort of iconoclastic pride, fearlessly defying convention with my choice of non-matching pre-shoe footwear. If people didn't like it, they could go to hell. Sure, it was a bit crazy. But that was me: a little bit dangerous, a little bit unpredictable. Everyone would just have to get used to it.
But as the years went by, I changed. Maybe I was becoming a bit more conservative, but I began to become wary of wearing odd socks. It wasn't that I was afraid of being a non-conformist anymore, but the opposite. I was actually conforming to a stereotype: the dull man who compensates for it by wearing odd socks, a colourful tie, a quirky hat. This wasn't a sudden realisation, but a gradual one. I still wore odd socks occasionally, but without the pride of my earlier, carefree days when I wasn't so self-aware.
The trouble was, I couldn't bring myself to organise my socks into pairs. The laundry came out of the machine and was stuffed randomly into drawers and cupboards. Since I would usually oversleep most mornings and then have to get dressed in a rush, I would usually just choose the first two socks I could find. If they were odd, I could hardly be accused of doing it on purpose - it was just an outcome of my disorganised morning rush.
It was around this time that I hit upon an obvious solution. As my coloured socks wore out, I replaced them with black ones. A few years later, my sock collection was mostly (though not entirely) black. Now I could choose two socks, with chances in the high nineties that they would match.
As you may have predicted, this system had a downside. In a word, boredom. Every day meant black socks. I felt like a middle aged man, instead of the sprightly young buck that I really was. How had I grown old so quickly? Was it simply because of my practical approach to, as the French say, la mode de les pieds?
Luckily, there was a ray of light shining through the darkness of my sock drawer: a pair of football socks I'd had since I was a schoolboy. Red and long, these socks gave me hope. There was still some colour with which to clothe my feet. Every so often, I would wear these socks with a sense of pride, my last stand against the horrors of premature middle age.
It gradually became clear to me that I needed more colourful socks. So this Christmas, I went down to Next and bought five pairs of size 9-11 socks. Red. Orange. Yellow. Green. Blue.
Two short of a rainbow. I can happily report that these five pairs are now my favourite socks. They make me feel interesting, young, hip and with a subtle, acceptable quantity of self-awareness.
