Socks Without Partners

Socks Without Partners

I’ll tell you a story of heart-ache and loss,

With a happy ending that’s a heartener,

Of a garment that was lost in the washing,

The tale of a sock without a partner.

Tootsie, for that was the sock’s name,

Suddenly found herself lonely and lonesome,

Carried off in the basket with the rest,

But realised she was all on her own-some.

They’d gone, as usual, in the washer together,

Then her other half seemed not to be there.

How had they managed to drift apart,

When they’d always been part of a pair?

She’d found herself in with some dirty types;

Their filthy behaviour caused her to wince,

And she found herself turned inside out,

When she finally came out of the rinse.

There’d been too much of a crowd in the basket,

With bras and knickers she’d been forced to mingle,

And it was only as she hung on the line,

That she realised that she was now single.

There was no-one to meet her or match her,

She started to rue, her anxiety grew,

She knew she was useless on her own,

There was no purpose unless there were two.

Then a kindly old night-shirt took pity,

When he saw that Tootsie was crying.

He made a suggestion to the young sock:

There was a way out, something worth trying.

“There’s a special support group,” he told her,

“Where singles can meet with a view to dating:

Goes by the name of Socks Without Partners,

Where the lucky ones may end up by mating.”

“But I’m too old to find anyone now,

With my ticking biological clock,

No-one will want some-one as washed-up as me,”

Thus wailed the little pink and white sock.

“They’ll see that I’m neither modern nor new,

My stitching’s all bobbled and sunken,

My colour has faded, my pattern’s all shaded,

And my elastic’s completely shrunken.”

  

The night-shirt replied, “it’s time that you tried,

By putting forward your very best foot.

And, of course, you’ll need to be on your toes,

If you want to get yourself out of this rut!”

“They don’t hang about in these places, you know,

If it’s a partner you’re after catching;

You only get two minutes for chatting,

It’s a new thing they call speed-matching.”

So Tootsie was thrown in the airing cupboard,

With no-one to love her, nobody to care,

When, just for a moment, somewhere in the pile,

Was that a flash of pink she could see there?

The colour wasn’t perfect it seemed,

The patterns on them differed some ways,

But they found that they had plenty in common,

To team up together for a few days.

The other old sock had lost his partner too,

And had been left long in this cupboard’s heat,

But they decided they could walk out together,

And, as a new partnership, they could meet.

So the moral of this story’s quite clear:

If you’ve been abandoned, don’t cry and moan -

There’s always some-one out there that’s for you,

Never give up if you’re left on your own.

Copyright Andy Fawthrop 2015