In February I touched on the difficulty of finding men’s long woollen socks, only to have a Dymock reader point out that members of the Ramblers Association may have cornered the market, especially in the red socks made by HJ Hall of Hinckley.
This month an event occurred which made me ponder on the longevity of the modern sock, and I have concluded that they do not last as they used to. Male readers may have noticed that socks have a curious habit of developing a hole in line with the big toe. But this phenomenon does not strike at the same time in both socks, and so first thing in the morning one invariable puts on a sock only to find that it has to be removed and then placed on the other foot.
Because my generation was brought up to believe that waste was sinful, socks used to be darned. But that practice has now died out, and so I wait until both socks have holes before passing them on to today’s equivalent of the Rag-&-Bone man. However, during a recent sermon the Vicar of Bromsberrow mentioned sheep and the thought flickered through my mind that I could reduce waste were I to discard the holy woollen sock but then match its counterpart with an unholy woollen sock from another pair.
This ought to please eco-warriors who reckon that methane gas from my woolly sheep is warming the planet, and so they will be happy when I tell them that matching one unholy sock with another unholy sock qualifies as a carbon offset. This virtuous thought lingered with me until it I realised that should socks of differing lengths be worn together, the result could be a disconcerting draught up a trouser leg.
In the interests of accurate reporting, I have to say that during his sermon the Vicar actually made no mention of woollen socks, however his lesson from St John’s gospel did make much of the importance of sheep to the people of biblical times. He further told us that biblical sheep recognised the voice of their shepherds and would follow them back to their evening shelter, or fold.
As the sermon continued, I looked around and noticed that amongst the congregation were at least eight people who knew a great deal about sheep and have shared the same experiences and concerns of their New Testament counterparts. Indeed, our own modest flock of woolly Ovines know our voices and, despite being hidden from view by the lie of the land, will always answer to a call of, “Come on, Come on my luvlies.”
Whilst listening to sermons, I usually close my eyes, but do open them occasionally to make a note on the service sheet or in the back of my NFU diary. These jottings help me remember what I have heard and, because experts tell us our chemical memory retains everything we have ever seen or heard my mind must have stored away the contents of thousands of sermons. Whatever the experts say however, we all know that the problems begin when we try to recall a specific item.
There are ways of helping us remember, such as repeating what we have heard as in the rote learning of our Times Tables. In addition recitation, note taking, and writing compositions also help us to file things in the drawers of our minds. We are also told that if we associate what we have heard or seen with something else already in the mind, this too can help us ‘find’ things when required.
It is interesting to note that all this was understood by the school teachers of my youth, and that this knowledge was then used to help construct the filing systems which lie behind the operating systems and software of modern computers.
Despite knowing this, some folk’s heads still appear to contain the mental equivalent of a huge galvanised bath into which they throw every experience and every thought, and so little wonder that these people have difficulty in sorting out one thing from another. On the other hand there are those whose passion for separating one detail from another means that they never see the ‘big picture.’
Most of us are somewhere between these extremes, and our minds can probably be likened to the raffia boxes which my wife tells me can be purchased from a shop in Gloucester, and which are divided into fourteen compartments into which a complete fortnight’s supply of socks (or other personal items) can be loaded in advance. It is a salutary thought that our heads may contain only the mental equivalent of a two week supply of woolly socks.
We should not however let this thought depress us too much, after all, given our biblical life span of three score years and ten, we cannot possibly fill our brain’s capacity and, because we all know that Britain has straitened times ahead, I reckon that it is no bad thing to have a bucket full of hopeful sermons in ones mind.
View from the Pew 