In the Wee Small Hours…

You know the kind of nights when you can’t stop your brain from working?  They usually coincide with those nights when you have the sudden realisation of age; when you can not only feel, but (if you close your eyes) actually see time slipping away; when you are convinced that your heart is joining in on a Neil Peart drum solo and that the small, previously innocuous mole on your forehead has become, in the scant few hours of tortured unrest, the size and colour of a cumquat.  It’s funny, isn’t it, that something that is so difficult to rouse at 6am becomes impossible to switch off at 2am?  Is it right that you should have to plead for sleep with the contents of your own head?  And what so preoccupies the synapses that they refuse to close down?  Well last night, for me, was the realisation that I had spent the entire day in Monday’s socks.

Now, I don’t want you to think that I was wearing the same socks as I wore two days ago, nor indeed that I had a pair set aside specifically for that day.  No, it is simply that I have a set of socks – fourteen in total – that are marked with the days of the week and whilst I find that useful when balling up pairs, I seldom look at the days when I wear them.  At midnight it occurred to me that I should.  Why?  Well simply in case somebody should assume that I am the kind of person who ensures that his socks tell the correct day when he slips them on and therefore that I have been wearing the same pair for three days.  Who might that be?  I have no idea.  I have no plans to take my shoes off anywhere but home, but when my mind decides that there is a possibility to be had, there is no way to dissuade it.

Until it starts to think about pants.

Now I don’t have pants with the days of the week on them (that would be madness).  I don’t have pants with anything on them, but it did occur to me that I had been wearing a pair of pants all day that, coincidentally matched, exactly, the colour of my (on the face of it) three-day old socks, which left open the possibility that anyone having seen my pant/sock combo (I have racked my brain to think of somebody, but to no avail) might deduce that I always go for matching and – having caught full-sight of the logo on my socks – that my pants too were therefore forty eight hours past their prime.

So, I resolved that, in future, when wearing my day of the week socks I would endeavour to ensure that I always wore them on the appropriate day and, furthermore, that I would match them with pants of the same colour in order to make it clear that both were changed on a regular basis.

Except that I was not at all certain that I have seven pairs of pants that match the socks and there was no way that I could check because a) my wife was asleep, b) the drawer squeals when opened and groans when shut, c) the bedroom was (it now being 1am) pitch black, d) my bedside lamp which contains the dimmest bulb in the known Universe, becomes a searchlight in the middle of the night and e) my wife really doesn’t like being woken by my bedside light in the wee small hours.  The only thing I could do was to attempt some kind of stocktake in my head, but I became distracted by the olive waistband/burgundy welt/burgundy waistband/olive welt conundrum and I could think of no way of solving it without laying them all out physically in a line and matching them up.  At 2am?  No, of course I didn’t.

I did it at six, when I got up…