Thursday, July 09, 2009

On socks and sandals

On socks and sandals

Matalan: Crucible of the World's greatest ideas. For it was in that fine establishment's branch in Weymouth that I had this spunker of an idea.

After mentioning it on Twitter, the internet's premier slacking-off site du jour, it drew the attention of one of this nation's finest minds:

"Submit it to Dave Gorman's Genius TV show" said TV's Dave Gorman of Dave Gorman's Genius TV show, but their web form's gone on the blink, so I'm going to park my plan here for the time being.

This time next year, Rodders...

Dear TV's Dave Gorman

I live in a well-known seaside resort, and every year our eyes are assaulted by the shocking fashion faux pas that is people wearing socks and sandals in public.

Like this.

This is often made far, far worse by the socks being a) knee-length and b) bright, eye-gouging colours. They also tend to hunt in packs, meaning there is no escape for we in the sensible sandals-and-no-socks majority.

My wife has put a stop to my annual game of socks-and-sandals spotting (which goes by the excellent name of "Fashion Police" with its own beautifully contrived scoring system based on the Robot Wars concept of style, control, damage and aggression) with the guilt-trip that is "Perhaps they're wearing those socks for medical reasons".

Judging by the number of victims, there are an awful lot of people in coastal resorts with bad feet.

She repeats the "medical reasons" mania every two minutes whilst in town, so I am coming to the conclusion that there may be some truth in this and these poor, poor wretches are not victims of poor fashion taste, but simply do not have a readily-available way to hide their socks-and-sandals shame.

That is, until now: Pending the invention of transparent socks (which will have to wait until we've perfected faster-than-light travel, to be honest), I have come up with this – frankly – awesome idea: Flesh-coloured socks for medical sock-and sandals victims.

These socks will come in a range of skin tones to suit all customers. The premium brand will also come with black flecks to simulate leg hair and blotches to match up with hideous skin conditions.

To reach the right customers, they will be sold at Post Offices, discount shops and jumble sales, and given away as free gifts for any June Whitfield-fronted funeral plan or stair lift.

My ultimate aim is to have enterprise tsar Alan Sugar wearing these to Cabinet Meetings and on future episodes of The Apprentice. He strikes me as a knotted-hanky, sock-and-sandals type of guy who takes his seaside holidays very seriously and would be the ideal figurehead for this product.

Your pal

Albert O'Balsam

PS I am not mad.

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