I fully realise that I am setting myself up for ridicule here but what the hell – I’m used to that. So yes – these are my socks. Well they are one half of a weeks supply of socks.

I found them last autumn in Marks and Spencer, bought three weeks worth – which is more or less my clothing washing cycle – and they are great. They are soft, warm, comfortable and no matter where I am, if I forget what day of the week it is I can quickly whip off a shoe and find out. Great eh?

It has been known for my other half to ask me if I could get out a pair of her socks from her sock drawer. This is a bit of a nightmare. The first hurdle is getting the drawer open because socks of all shapes, sizes and colours have been crammed in to overflowing. And when the drawer is finally prised out chaos reigns. You know there are matching pairs in there somewhere…

Being a fairly organised chap I don’t have this problem. And having socks that just cry out to be stacked in day order makes the whole task easier. Then in the morning I can just open the drawer and take the next two off the top. Easy.

A little while back I wrote an item called “Where is that secret place that cutlery goes?‘ and socks, as everyone knows, are just as cunning as cutlery. Maybe even more so. Yesterday was the last day of my three weeks worth of socks and when I opened the drawer and fished out the last two you can imagine my surprise when there was just the one Saturday sock. And one Wednesday sock.

And I have no idea how they did that.

It seems that I now most definitely live in ‘grey time’.

This is the kind of time where someone reminds you that it is Christmas in five weeks and your first reaction is to say ‘hang on a moment there… didn’t I just put the box of decorations away in the attic a few days ago?’

If you, too, live in grey time then you will recognise this condition. Someone might ask if you have had a good vacation this year and you start to enthuse about where you have just come back from only to see that look in your other halfs eyes forcing a quick recalculation of just which year that vacation actually happened.

It’s like the last post I made here on Yellow Swordfish – the one with the humorous photo of the apologetic bus. I could have sworn that was just last week yet the date clearly shows it was four months. And that’s four months of grey time I can not, totally account for.

When you are a young kid and the world is new, shiny and infinitely exciting a day seems like a month and a month a year. School summer holidays went on and on and school terms felt like a lifetime. By the time you reach grey time – having traversed all kinds of different timeframes along the way – days vanish like snow on water. And I am not sure why, although I assume it is not some perverse, personalised attack by the universe on just me. I suspect it is really that the little switches in my brain are getting a little stiff and rusty and are slower to move.

At the far end of the age spectrum we once knew a charming old man in his 90’s who would periodically wander around his house in search of his younger wife to ask her if he had had his tea yet. He had clearly moved beyond the Grey and was deeply entrenched in White Time.

So it’s not that I have been ignoring my blog as such. It’s just that I decided to take a few days off. Well – it does say Random and Irregular at the top.

(If you read the blog of Mrs Swordfish – and plenty of people do – then I pinched the photograph of the back of my head from there)