Danskcolin: Thursday July 18th 2024 "Where do YOU stand on 'the Sock' ?!!!!!"

Here's a question for you - are you wearing socks, dear Reader? Just take a glance "down there" and check for me, will you, and a simple "yes" or "no" (by postcard only (!)) will suffice. Somebody once said that a gentleman isn't a gentleman unless he's got socks on, and that's at least one thing my long-suffering wife Lois and I absolutely agree on!

My foot size is 10 (UK), so I normally buy socks in the 6-11 size range - I forget the exact range displayed on the label, but I always say it's more comfortable if your feet aren't "bursting" to get out of their socks, night and day. Call me an "obsessive" if you like haha!

flashback to July 2023: me on a shopping trip to M&S to buy

socks in the 6-11 range, but diverted by a bra-seeking Lois

into women's underwear, by far the store's biggest department

- embarrassing, but I try not to look haha !!!!

It's quite something, though, isn't it, this giant sock, the "Earth Sock" that everybody's talking about at the moment, the one that NASA has created, which must be size like - a billion (UK). That's just a guess by yours truly, and it may be bigger still, probably! And in US terms even a humble size one billion (UK) would be approximately 1.1 billion (US), but the exact size hasn't been officially released yet, so we must wait to hear on that one [Source for story: Onion News] !

It's quite something, the Earth Sock "project", and it shows that much of the world can "come together" and cooperate on enormous legwear at least, which is nice.

And where do YOU stand on what's now being called simply "the Sock"? It's still a bit controversial, isn't it.

And to give Onion News their due, side-by-side with their reporter's obvious delight at the success of the giant project, the website is being marvellously "up-front" on what some are calling "the Sock's perceived drawbacks":

So, to sum up, the jury is very much still out on this one. But I think that all of us, be we "for" or "agin" "the Sock", as a piece of enormous legwear - we can all come together to enjoy 83-year-old Neil Diamond's latest song, "Earth Sock", which began to "chart" last week on both sides of the Atlantic:

Fabulous stuff isn't it!

Well, I think we all enjoyed seeing those lyrics by "Ol' Brown Eyes" again, and, if you're like me, you enjoyed "singing along to them" even, but you're probably wondering why I'm talking about socks at all today, aren't you.

[I've honestly stopped caring by this point, Colin! - Ed]

Well, seeing as how you're asking, lunchtime today is my first appointment with Becky, the podiatrist at the medical centre where our local NHS doctor also resides, the surgery that Lois and I signed up to after we moved to Malvern from Cheltenham in October 2022.

Lois and me sitting in the podiatry waiting-area

at our medical centre today, waiting for Becky, the

centre's podiatrist to call me into her office

Today is my first meeting with Becky, the centre's podiatrist. My feet do tend to give me issues, and particularly since my hip replacement operation in April.

I don't know if you know this, but if a surgeon cuts a hole in you to take your old hip out and put a shiny-new one in, your body will react by going into a defensive "trauma" stance or mode, and isn't it a nice feeling to know that our bodies are firmly "on our side" if there's ever an attack, or just a threat of an attack, by some unknown surgeon taking place on it. It's kind of reassuring, isn't it.

The body's reaction is for the leg on the same side to swell up, and this is what happened to me. It's quite normal, my surgeon told me, and the swelling will go down gradually over the following few months. This is what's happened to me - my knee and calf, swollen after the operation, have gradually gone back to normal, and only my right foot is just marginally larger than my left foot, so it's all coming together gradually, but hence my recent order to "The Fitville" for some black slip-on trainers size 10 width a massive "Wide 2E" - yikes!

Today is my first session with Becky, but I think we're going to get on just fine. She did a general health check on me, saying the pulse in both my feet was "excellent", and when I had to close my eyes for her to shoot some sort of signal at my feet, I felt it every time and shouted "Yes!", which she said was "great" too.

She even asked me about how active a life-style I had, and I started to say "not very active the last couple of years" because of my hip problems, but when I said that Lois and I try to do a little walk of 20-30 minutes most days, she said that that counted as "active" at our age, so that's nice to hear too. "Inactive" means sitting on the sofa all day, apparently. Who knew that?

When the appointment is over, Becky gives me a little booklet about how to look after your feet, which I discuss with Lois when we got home.

Lois and I think that's impractical - who wants to do all that every day? We wouldn't have time for anything else, even for our afternoon "nap-time" which would be a pity.

On the other hand, feet are important, aren't they. Remember Bernard Bresslaw's iconic anthem to feet "You Need Feet" (1958)?

The intro: