The Cloned Balaclava

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A time came when once again I could rummage through the giant stiff drawers where the olden clothing lives, and there I found many tattered comfy things - jumpers, trousers, knickers, socks – that I had thought long gone to the great recycling bins of Kemnay.

And since winter will soon be upon us I was most pleased to find the balaclava that had come into my life way back in 1954, and kept me unscathed through many an unsettling episode. Wearing this iconic headgear, I reasoned, I shall probably be able to crutch my way along the road even when the snows come, without falling over.

the 1954 balaclave on Ben Nevis

So I put it on, and once again felt the comforting warmth that had so often restored courage and rationality to the fading brain. Yes, this would surely get me through the approaching cold, and did I not remember a pair of long woollen socks that might help the failing feet? I burrowed onwards, farther into the dark recesses of the mighty bottom drawer.

But what can this be? Another black balaclava, and then yet another, dark grey? How have they come here? I bought only one black one in 1954, and never another, except for a navy one some years later, which I didn’t like (too small, too colourful), and never wore. Now there are two black balaclavas (balaclavae?), and one dark grey one, and nowhere is there a navy one. Nowhere. I have rummaged at the cost of great effort through every piece of furniture that holds any kind of clothing, and there is no navy balaclava anywhere. Yet there are two extra balaclavas that I have never bought/borrowed/stolen. How can this be?

Being of an age where I have plenty of thinking time, I have thought out the only rational explanation. Call the original balaclava the parent, and the extra black and grey ones the offspring (who knows whether any of them are m or f? gender in a balaclava is relatively unimportant), and call the navy one the reject. Here is my thesis: the parent, bored by years of living in a drawer without adventures, cloned a black offspring, and some years later another offspring, slightly lighter in colour as his ageing powers began to fade. For some years the parent and his two offspring lived on in the drawer in harmony but increasingly hungry for action; eventually they turned on the navy reject, formulating the convenient idea that navy was not the right colour for a proper balaclava, pounced on it, tore it shreds and … (the horror!) … ATE it, in a misguided cloud of Anti-Navyism.

You may feel that this scenario is unlikely. Yet how do you explain away the scraps of navy woolly fluff that are to be seen in that drawer and nowhere else? No, I think we have to accept that the balaclava is a more dangerous animal than we had realised, mild and comforting so long as its emotional needs are met, but prone to cannibalism in the sufficiently long term.

But I shall still wear it: it may be a cannibal but it is still an old friend, and deserves some excitement in the evening of its days. Probably it would be best to wear the offspring as well, from time to time.

Just in case.

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… so off I went to take a picture, to show that it wasn’t all pure fantasy; and here they are, the parent and its two offspring crouched on envelopes on the little sewing desk (!) in the window …

… and clearly one of the offspring is navy. Not eaten. No cannibalism

The relief! After all that speculation and fear, it was just that the cataract-clouded eyes can’t see colours properly any longer. (Though why can they see the navy easily in a photograph and not in real life? eh?)

Now we have merely a parent, a reject and a mystery offspring. Cloning in a balaclava I can live with, free from the threat of cannibalism.

Only now, every time I buy something online I have to wonder what colour it really is.

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