Today I have one foot in the present and one foot in the future. This is quite literally true as I am wearing days of the week socks. My mother bought them for me for Christmas - I know it's cliché ridden to get socks for Christmas but at the beginning clichés are true and it's only later that they become simply clichés rather than truisms. For example there's "room enough to swing a cat in here" we now say the phrase but unlike the ancients we no longer swing cats to decide on the ampleness of room size* but instead rely on dragons ability to turn around without knocking over an Ikea lamp.**

So while it's a truism to say that sons receive socks for Christmas from their mothers it's also true to say that this years socks were special. This year I received socks with the aforementioned days of the week on them. At first I thought that the main reason for this was that I am reasonably disorganised and that if I wore the socks it would give me a ready methodology for telling what day it was at any time. However on closer examination of the socks I decided that there might be something deeper at work. Each sock is black (or very very very very dark navy to be precise) in the main but in the heel there is a coloured section and each day has a different colour. And I decided that perhaps this, and not the days themselves were important. As I have previously mentioned ((The number of socks I have - 1) / 1) I have a terrible problem keeping my socks paired and so perhaps this was the real aim of the days of the week socks? At any rate today I am wearing on the left foot the correct sock for today and on the right foot the correct sock for tomorrow.

And on that note I'll leave it to the footnotes to deal with the history.

* They weren't swinging an actual cat of course. It was a cat of (or "o'" if you prefer) nine tails. There were some rooms on a ship which were big enough to swing a cat o' nine tails and some in which there was not.

** This is the central premise behind feng shui; the principle, effectively, of "what would a dragon do". This makes almost no sense up front and then much more after a while. Humans are very bad at imagining how they use space. We see ourselves as the physical size that we are rather than paying attention to the fact that to feel comfortable we need the three-dimensional version of white space around us. A dragon adds the bulk required for this and also suggests the kind of flow required for moving between different spaces by being longer than it is broad. The system does this without the need to understand how it works, anyone can deal with "what would a dragon do". Feng Shui books are therefore generally lots of words trying to say anything other than what is in this paragraph as it would give the game away rather.