Socks

At the moment I am without shoes. Like many students who rent accommodation from their university, at the start of this summer I was expected to get the hell out, and take all my stuff with me. I'd fooled myself into thinking I didn't own much, when the truth is that I don't own much that I ever moved. Einstein's famous equation, E equal to M times c squared, tells us that 99% of the energy that most objects have is their "rest-mass" energy. This is the energy that fusion reactors try to tap into. The little domain of energy we can deal with- kinetic, electric, and so on- is all we suspected was there until people started putting radioactive cats in boxes and so on. It's the same with my possessions.

When I realised the extent of the fossilized boxes of things I had to get out of my room, I made the Faustian pact that most students at one time or other will make. I got my car-owning parents to drive up and collect me.

I strongly advise against this course of action. I won't go into the details, but in my case the end results was that she threw out my shoes.

Don't imagine I'm courting tetanus at all times: I do still have a pair of sandals. These are very respectable sandals, the social climbers of the sandal world, that you can wear in polite company without consequences (unless you count a tendency for people to assume you're a Liberal Democrat).

In point of fact I'm going barefoot quite often anyway. It's summer, and I won't let steel skies, rain or chilblains tell me otherwise. But barefoot or in lefty sandals, you still face what I consider to be the biggest drawback: no socks.

On the whole, and in most situations, I'm happy to wave socks goodbye, but there are a few settings when they are useful. When you've got greasy food on your fingers, a good absorbent black sock is this century's handkerchief.

wake up captain