I will say this once and then we can both pretend I did not: they are better socks than the ones I used to wear, and I wore mine for eleven years. Crew height, which is the old height, the correct height, and the height that stops the shoe collar from taking the skin off the back of your ankle in the third set.
What is actually in them. Cushioned heel and toe — the two places a tennis sock wears through, and the two places the impact lands, so that is not decoration, that is where the padding belongs. A mesh panel across the top of the foot, which is where heat leaves the foot fastest and where nobody thinks to put ventilation.
Soft, stretchy fabric that holds its shape rather than bagging at the arch by the end of a session. CLIMACOOL wicks and disperses sweat, and the fast-dry fibres mean the second set does not feel like wading. Vintage 3-Stripes styling with the Trefoil, and I resent how good that looks.
Sizes small through extra large.
Johannesburg, then, and I have compared it unfavourably to a dozen cities and I am about to stop. Constitution Hill first: a courtroom built out of the actual bricks of the Old Fort prison that stood on the site — they dismantled the place people were held and made the highest court in the country out of its material.
I have never seen that done anywhere else.
Then the Apartheid Museum, which you enter through gates marked white and non-white, and your ticket decides which one, and the argument is made before you have read a word. The Carlton Centre next, a viewing deck on the 50th floor over the whole downtown grid, opened in 1973 and still the way to see the shape of the place.
And Vilakazi Street in Soweto, with Mandela's four-room brick house halfway along — one street that produced two Nobel laureates, and I have looked for a second street like it and there is not one.
“They built the highest court out of the prison's own bricks. Nowhere else has ever thought of that. Fine. It wins.”
Good socks. Great city. I concede both, and I would like it noted that conceding is not something I do.
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