55) How to wear socks with shorts without looking like Jeremy Corbyn.

The time for hypsockrisy is over. I must finally break free from the shackles of chic.  Whatever fashion decrees, I  can no longer  keep up the pretence:  yes, it’s true, I hate wearing shoes without socks.

I loathe the feeling as the inner sole of the shoe sticks to the sweaty skin of my bare foot and peels away again.  It sounds unpleasant and it is. It sounds unhygienic and I think it must be. It sounds like I should have odour eaters lining my shoes and gulping down the fetid air and I very probably should.

I am sure I am not alone in this revulsion of barefoot shoe wearing.  I am certain I speak for millions, nay billions, of men. I believe that many of  the very hipsterest of hipsters, the very chaps who blithely pretend that all is well is in their blistered world,  secretly  feel just as I do. I’ll bet you, yes you, you who cowers at the sight of the fashion police, privately agree with my every word even as you socklessly bestride the streets of Shoreditch.

Admit it: Not wearing socks is a total pain.

But fashion is a cruel and unforgiving  mistress. She dictates that one must go sans sock when wearing shorts and she brooks no argument.  So what is a world renowned fashionista  such of myself to do? Should I accept that I must bear this pain in the cause of beauty? Or should I  take my cue from the Corbmeister and his sandals  and say it loud and say it proud: sockses and shorts go together like crosses and noughts?

It is a hideous dilemma, because, let’s face it, neither pain nor Jezzawear are remotely satisfactory solutions.

Or rather it was a hideous dilemma. Because necessity, as it always must,  has once again become the mother of invention. I have found a solution. Yes, I really have. And now I am ready to share my good news with the world.

It was my flat feet that gave me the idea. My arches  long since fallen from the heady heights of youth have to be propped up by orthotics – lovingly moulded to my feet by the delightful Eileen Gemmill at the National Orthapaedic Hospital in Bolsover Street – and these I transfer from shoe to shoe. Shortly I shall explain the crucial role they played.

But, first the context. Yesterday, for the first time, I came to put on my new grey canvas slip-ons – R400 (about £18) in the sale at  the Lacoste shop in the Cape Town Waterfront. (In case you were wondering why I am wearing shorts in January, it is because I have temporarily decamped to Sarth Efreeka.) I took them out of  their shiny box and carefully inserted my orthotics. And finally, in an attempt to minimise the amount of visible sock, I first slipped around my feet a pair of those  specially truncated and elasticated white cotton sockettes that do just about  disappear into a pair of Nikes. However, as you can see from Fig 1 above, they  stubbornly remain visible above what you might call the plimsoll line of my new Lacoste beach casuals.

For several hours I perambulated thus,  bravely trying to ignore the sneers and jibes of passers by,  turning my face against their tut-tutting whispers and jabbing fingers, wincing at the wounding  remarks of small children – “Mummy, Mummy, why is that  man wearing socks with shorts?”  - “Avert your eyes Perdita/Channing/Tuppence instantly! You’re too young to understand.”

Eventually, unable to bear the humiliation any longer, I went home and lay down in a darkened  room. And there, inspiration came to me. Wait a cotton sockette  pickin’ minute I thought, what if - ! I leapt up, pulled off my shoes, ripped out my orthotics, and tore off my sockettes.

Then, I took one of the sockettes and (Fig 2) slipped it not back over my foot, but around one of the orthotics! (For the benefit of future biographers, I believe it was the left.) I then worked the sockette around so the elastic bit tightened and gripped under the sole and the sock part smoothed out across the top of the sole. (Fig 3).  Next I carefully put the now besocketted othortic back in the shoe and gingerly, slowly, holding my breath – and communing silently across time with all those legendary originators who have changed the course of world history, feeling just as Hans Lippershey must have done when he lifted the first telescope to his eye, as Logie Baird must have done when he waited to see if the first television signal would really register, as the chap who invented the wheel must have done when he first fitted it to a cart – I put my foot in.

I won’t pretend it was instant success. Just as Logie Baird might have seen a bit of interference on his telly screen before adjusting the signal so I felt a little rucking of the sockette as I attempted to slide my foot over it. But a slight readjustment and – Eureka! My sockless foot rested comfortably inside my shoe, protected from the unsympathetic surface of the orthotic by the prophylactic cotton of the sockette. It was foot next to cotton, cotton next to orthotic – job done!

Bursting with excitement, I then repeated the experiment with the other foot. I stood up, I walked around, I flung open my front door and stepped boldly into the street. I stared straight into the eyes of passers-by. I dared them to sneer at me now. Not so much as the trace of a single snigger. They looked down, they saw my shoes, but, as Nelson might have said, they saw no socks. (Fig 4.)

Three questions will of course be uppermost in your mind.

1. What if your arches still proudly rise and you have no  orthotics?  Answer: Take out the inner sole from your shoe and wrap your sockette around that. And if the inner sole is disobligingly stuck tight, get a pair of Dr.Scholl (or similar) inner soles, and use those. If these alternatives are  not be rigid enough to keep the sockette elastic from bunching them  up, I suggest cutting the elastic.

2. What about the other upper bits  of the inside of the shoe? Might not they still press and rub against the tops of your feet? Yes, I have to concede that could be a problem with the wrong shoes. But, as ever, half a loafer is better than none.

3. What about flip-flops? No satisfactory answer to that. But every invention has it’s limitations. You can only see so far with even the strongest telescope.

I think that about covers it. As you can’t fail to agree this is probably the greatest advance for humankind since they put wheels onto suitcases.  (Sir Tim Berners hit on  something useful with the Internet but it pales into insignificance compared with this.)

I look forward to my knighthood, my Legion d’Honeur, my Nobel Prize. And, for having released the human race from the tyranny of this cruel fashion, the call to the White House for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the citation  for which will inevitably be, ‘One small invisibly socked step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.’