My uncle sold mittens and was defensive about it.
“What do you need the individual fingers for?” He asked, often. He was always taking shots at traditional gloves.
On day, I felt like I might as well respond to this question, even though I didn’t really care. I half-heartedly suggested “Chopsticks?”
He did a little confused laugh, as though he’d never heard of anything so stupid.
“If you’re eating food with chopsticks, the temperature of the dish would keep your hands warm anyway. Why would you need the mittens?”
“What about sushi?” I asked, getting a bit more into it.
He wasn’t so quick with his comeback this time. Eventually, he said: “On the rare occasion where you happen to be in a situation where your hands are cold enough to justify mittens, and you happen to be eating sushi, then you can just use a fork.”
“Tell that to the Japanese,” I said. I’d clearly won.
It wasn’t just mittens, though. He’d started to expand his range into scarves. But with a twist. Literally.
Möbius scarves, they were called. He was really proud of the idea, and he could barely wait to tell me, even though I’d never previously shown any enthusiasm for his business, and mostly just shot down his mitten theories.
They were scarves in the style of Möbius strips. I think he’s only just found out about Möbius strips and was getting carried away.
“So it’s not really a scarf?” I said.
“Yes, it’s a scarf,” he said. “It’s just one continuous loop of scarf.”
“One continuous loop,” I repeated (fully aware of how annoyed he was getting). “So it’s essentially a baggy snood? It’s essentially a baggy snood.”
He made a face and started winding wool. His assistant, Vida, was standing nearby. “Have you heard about these Möbius scarves?” I asked her. “It’s essentially just a baggy snood.” She shrugged.
I turned back to my uncle. “It’s essentially just a baggy snood.”
“Shut up!” He snapped. “Stop saying it’s essentially just a baggy snood.”
“But it is essentially…”
He slammed his hand down on the table. “What are you even talking about?!”
We were all quiet for a couple of minutes. Vida pretended she had to go to the toilet just to get away from us both.
After a while, things had thawed, and he was back on track with his sales pitch. “I’m thinking of something very specific for the Möbius scarf. Specific, but lucrative.”
“What’s that?” I felt bad for shutting him down before, so I thought I’d hear him out.
“You know those half and half football scarves they have now? It’s like one end is in the colours of one team, and the other is their opponents’? Like, if it’s Arsenal-Tottenham, it’s half red and half white? You know those scarves?”
“You mean, those universally derided scarves that everyone hates?”
“Someone’s buying ‘em,” he said, with a smile. He’d won that one.
“Anyway,” he continued, “ the genius of the Möbius scarf is that instead of one team at each end of the scarf, you can have one team on each side of the scarf!”
I’d tried my best to be encouraging, but this was the last straw.
“Geoff,” I said (his name was Geoff), “in your exhaustive research – which I assume you always undertake before a major product launch – surely you must have learned that a defining, if not the defining, feature of a Möbius strip is it only has ONE SIDE.”
He looked blank. Vida walked back in, read the atmosphere of the room, and went straight back out to the toilet again.
“What do you mean?” Said Geoff.
“If you put Arsenal on one side of the scarf, it’ll go all the way around,” I said.
He looked blank again.
“Where are you going to put Tottenham?”
He stood there for a few seconds, and then mimed holding what looked like a baggy snood.
“On the other side,” he said.
Remember around 2012, snoods were in, like, the top five things people talked about that year? It’s crazy to think that now. With all the horrors of 2017, snoods wouldn’t crack the top hundred. We didn’t know how lucky we were.
