FORTROSE -- Lifelong bachelor, Ewan Hanson, 51, recently was hanging out the laundry behind his mother's house on Academy Street only to have an existential revelation.
"I'm not exactly sure if it was existential or not," he commented from the precarious comfort of a three-legged garden chair recently acquired through Black Isle Freebies. "In fact, I've lately begun questioning the existence of my understanding of the word in the first place, an admission which my mum's sparky [Innes MacInnes, who was unavailable for comment] said was a step in the right direction, like. The problem with lofty thinking and all its fancy vocabulary is that since we were out walking at the time, I'm not sure if he meant 'step' in the literal sense, or -- again I use the term uncertainly -- an existential one."
When asked about the revelation itself, the former Fortrose Academy student was only to happy to explain. "It was a sunny day, so I decided to take a chance and hang my laundry on the [clothes]line. Then I noticed that 15 socks came out of the washer. I've read on the Internet about how socks go missing without any earthly explanation. And then it hit me: maybe they don't go missing, maybe an extra one actually appears."
By his own admission, Hanson had not counted his socks as he put them into the washing machine that morning, shortly after a flavourless-but-searingly-hot flat white from his bedside Nespresso. He added that if there were indeed an extra sock, it was curious that it appeared to come from the same Duncan Bannatyne Collection that Hanson has favoured ever since "spiffing up my image" for an interview with RBS on Harbour Road, Inverness, eleven years earlier.
The interview in question did not result in a position with the bank, Hanson told us, but that was no reason to throw away "perfectly sound threads." RBS has yet to confirm whether Hanson's rejection was due to the new look or his CV's ambiguously-dated claims of management experience with non-existent financial institutions.
This article contains additional reporting by Jess Anderson
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