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Have you ever wondered about the mystery of socks? One of the most annoying and persistent issues in our family is the sock problem. I am certain that I buy them in pairs, but I think the manufacturers build in some sort of repellent device to ensure that after the first time they are worn they are never in the same place at the same time ever again!

Logic would suggest that people would take off both their socks in the same place and put both their socks in the laundry basket at the same time, but it seems that my family defy logic!! By the time the socks get to the washing machine it is too late to secure them neatly in a sock bag because some of them have already become separated from their partners. Anyway much as I love my family I really don’t want to get too intimately acquainted with a heap of dirty socks! Sorting the laundry into piles and putting it in the washing machine is quite enough involvement for me.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the tumble dryer is some sort of interstellar teleporter in disguise. Maybe at some point in the drying cycle it dispatches a lone sock to explore another world, or perhaps to explore this world in a different time frame. Maybe our lost socks have been baffling the great thinkers throughout space and time, who knows.

For me the end result is an enormous bag of ‘widows and orphans’ that I don’t know what to do with, I can’t bring myself to throw away odd socks when there is still hope of reuniting them with their wandering partners. Every month I sort through the bag and I have the occasional success when a lost sock is reunited with it’s mate, but mostly they are destined to endure a lonely and unfulfilled existence.

I suspect that the same sort of disappearing device is fitted to pens, scissors and telephone handsets – you can never find them when you want them. I long to go back to the days of telephones with fixed cables that couldn’t migrate to people’s bedrooms. In time there will be no teenagers to blame, the house will be neater and the telephone handset will remain obediently in it’s cradle but I suspect I will still wonder about the secret life of socks.