Unconscious uncoupling

The days of discombobulation acclimatising to daylight saving are always tricky. As darkness descends, you sit outside in dissident dusk denial freezing your whatsits off when really you should have retreated indoors hours ago.

By the time you go to bed your feet are like blocks of ice and you rummage through the sock drawer looking for the possum socks to work their hot magic.

You have a gradation of socks to cover slightly chilly tootsies all the way up to possum hoof coverings for feet so frigid they need to be stuck in an armpit to thaw out.

After ripping the place apart, you realise that the possum pair, like every other favourite pair of socks in your life, is now uncoupled and flying solo.

Alas, wonder socks like these are a rarity and they are clean out of stock at the sock shop.

You bleat to the shopkeeper: ‘‘When I’m dead and they’re packing up my stuff I bet someone finds that missing sock.’’

To which she replies: ‘‘Yeah and they’ll say, ‘There’s that sock she always used to go on about’.’’

To your surprise, but not really because socks have a habit of doing this, the AWOL sock turns up a few days later in exactly the same drawer you searched high and low for it.

Elated, you hold the two socks up, joining them together before tearing them apart in a homicidal rage. Where has the missing sock been all this time, you expostulate as you lead it by the scruff of its neck into the interrogation room, the one with the swinging naked light bulb, a cruel table, and two miserable chairs.

For the first hour you slap it round the chops with a wet bus ticket and when it refuses to confess, you beat its body with a phone book. Not that you’re into violence or anything.

Still it refuses to divulge where it’s been, swearing till it’s blue in its insolent face that it’s been here the whole time stuck up some twisted trouser leg or other.

Suddenly, all the fight goes out of you and you feel gaslighted, as if you’re losing your mind. The sock, thinking it’s got the better of you, gets up to leave as a postcard falls from its heel. Quickly you snatch it from the floor to find that the postcard is addressed to the other stay-at-home sock. You flip it over to reveal a group photo of the absentee sock in sunglasses lying on a deck chair at Club Sock with a bunch of other holidaying single socks laughing and sipping pina coladas.

The caption writ large and scrawled across it reads: ‘‘Eat your heart out, loser sock!’’

‘‘I knew it,’’ you scream triumphantly, realising that at last you’ve cracked the mysterious case of all missing socks.

You cuff the errant sock and enrage its other half by showing it the taunting abusive postcard. Scanning your DVD stack, you find what you’ve been looking for, returning to the interrogation room as the offending sock whispers hoarsely: ‘‘No, not the sock torture DVD.’’

Throughout the long night of revenge, you and loyal stay-at-home sock laugh maniacally listening to the screams coming through the next wall as a video of wet solo socks left too long in the dryer, and held too close to the fire, plays back-toback.

You and good sock pack your bags, lock the door, and to the sound of screeching tyres, speed off to Sockburn, spiritual home of all good socks, leaving the offending heel in an ankle bracelet, home and very alone.