Yes, you read that correctly. Socks. Foot-bags. Boot-liners. Toe-wrappers. Clothes for your feet. That's what we're here to talk about. Why?

Bear with me.

Now, there are many signs of growing older. Losing the taste for Froot Loops*. Discovering the taste for wine (the sort that doesn't come in a box). Mortgages. Bills. Kids. Responsibilities (shudder). Developing the unwavering certainty that the music/movies/books of your youth were without question and beyond dispute far superior to their current day equivalents. And, perhaps even more so, being unable to prevent yourself explaining why at the slightest opportunity. Sometimes even without an opportunity.

And then there are socks. Specifically, there is the discovery (some might even say epiphany) that socks matter. Socks are important.

That socks can make or break your day.

Okay, so maybe that's a slight exaggeration. On a day when, say, you get married or have a baby or win the lottery or your dog dies or you crash your car or have the kind of hangover that makes you not only vow never to drink again but also has you reconsidering the whole breathing thing, then perhaps socks don't feature too heavily in your frontal cortex. On those days they may not exert a great deal of influence on your assessment as to where that particular period of twenty-four hours rates on the scale of crapness to greatness.

But let's face it, that's not most days. Most days are a little more mundane. A little more routine and regular and expected. And hey, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Mundane can be perfectly acceptable if your everyday days are pretty good days. Which I hope yours are.

On those everyday days you traipse off to the office or the factory or the workshop or to school or university or the pub or the dungeon or lair or lounge room or whatever location/situation/space-station constitutes the customary daily place to which you traipse (or float).

And your socks traipse there with you.

Now, here's the thing. It's a much nicer traipse if those socks in which you're traipsing are good socks.

Let's backtrack a little (as I said, bear with me). I have my own business. It is a small business. When it opened, it was a very small business. Itsy-bitsy, in fact. Tiny. Microscopic would not be too much of a stretch. If you screwed yours eyes up tight and the light wasn't great, you might even wonder if it was really there at all. And as such, in its original Lilliputian state, my business did not make me very much money. I can recall being distinctly puzzled by its ability to pay substantial amounts of money to all the parties to which it was required to pay money—except for me. Heck, sometimes I had to even give it money.

The upshot of which is that for a while there I became something of, well...a tightarse. And amongst the everyday household items forced to endure the vicissitudes of my enforced parsimony were—you guessed it—my socks.

Half-price socks from the supermarket, multi-pair packs and sometimes even half-price multi-pair packs from the supermarket became my thing. Socks with seams that dug in, elastic that de-elasticked and insufficient structural integrity to prevent my inoffensive and not particularly oversized big toes from bursting clean through them.

In short, crappy socks. Crappy socks, of borderline quality when new, and distinctly south-of-the-border quality once worn a few times.

And, the thing was, as my business grew a little (man, puberty was tough) and my income at last pushed through the poverty line and became less inclined to induce tears from both me and my accountant, I kept right on wearing those crappy socks. Mainly because I was too busy/dumb/stubborn to give the matter much thought. I traipsed around work during the week and home at weekends in socks that bunched up around the toes, that fell down on one side and not the other, that twisted in strange ways and that were, not to put too fine a point on it, just plain annoying. My socks did not rock.

But then, not so long ago, I saw an online ad for socks. Socks that promised comfort. Socks that promised quality. Socks that promised to be the best damn socks I'd ever worn. And I sat there at my PC in my comfortable shirt and my comfortable pants and my uncomfortable socks and I stared at the ad and I mumbled obscenities at my feet and I pondered the apparent ineffectiveness of my adblocker and I thought to myself, "Hmm."

And then I gave those sock-people some money. Not an outrageous amount of money. But more dollars per sock than I had ever spent before in my entire life.

Was it worth it? In short—hell, yeah. Where have good socks been all my life? I've since bought socks from other companies which are every bit as good, so the whole 'best socks ever' thing was something of a steaming pile, but for the sake of having my eyes (and wallet) opened to the benefits of quality shoe-stuffers, I'm prepared to forgive a little exaggeration.

And do you wanna know the hallmark of a truly great sock? The benchmark by which my future footwraps will be judged? It's actually kind of counter-intuitive. And frankly, pretty dull. You see, the key feature of a good sock is...

You don't think about them.

Because, if they're staying up and keeping your toes enclosed, if the seams are not being unseemly and your legs' circulation is circulating as intended, then what's to think about? Bad socks you'll notice all day long. Good socks not once. Except for that moment of morning smugness when you pull the suckers on.

And if you're having one of those everyday days of little consequence, the ones that balance on the knife edge between good and not-so-good? Well then, the state of your socks might just swing things the right way.

I'm currently engaged on a world tour of quality socks, with an emphasis on those that can be ethically sourced. In part, this is to make up for the fact that during my tightarse phase my socks were likely manufactured in some third-world sweatshop by an exploited worker earning cents per hour, with my only consolation being that at the time I probably wasn't making a whole lot more. But it is also because of the aforementioned having kids/responsibilities thing. I'm aware the source of my socks will not have an undue influence on the fate of the planet, but hey—every little bit helps.

So. If you haven't given quality socks a crack, then I urge you to do so. And if you have? Then help me spread the word, fellow convert. Huzzah for good socks.

*Although perhaps we don't lose the taste so much as lose the ability to deal with both the guilt and the knowledge of what they're doing to our arteries and/or our Hba1c levels.