Sock drawer diplomacy and the campaign to restore order on the domestic front 

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It had been bubbling and gurgling for a while but I ignored it, made the best of an increasingly unmanageable situation and pushed it to the side. Something to be dealt with another day, I told myself. On my return from Bangkok I was confronted with the issue again and I was about to tackle it head-on but time wasn’t on my side, so I declared that today would be the day that I got back in control and dealt with a problem that had been slowing me down most mornings when I happened to be in Zürich. Yes, you guessed it dear reader, the sock drawers needed a brutal edit. 

In the run-up to the start of this operation, it was decided that the campaign would be somewhat surgical in nature and would take up two working days – with a little left over for lunch, shopping, a lake dip, column writing and Monocle on Sunday. The key targets were small mountains of magazines and newspapers, shoes for various activities, knitwear, undies, the drawers with rogue receipts and business cards and the multiple cupboards and cabinets of potions, lotions, tonics and tinctures. It’s now the end of the day on Saturday and I’m feeling quite good about things. The main bedroom is looking sharp but the guest bedroom is still a staging area and copies of favourite titles, such as Manera, Salon, Premium, Popeye and Brutus, need to be gathered up and put in order. Also, the CDs need a place to be played (I bought a stack of Taiwanese and Japanese jazz at Eslite in Taipei a few weeks ago) but there’s one cable missing from the Denon sound system that I have yet to pick up, so that will need to wait until the next domestic day arrives later in the month. 

There’s an overwhelming amount of print everywhere you look. There are so many magazines that have had a quick flip and demand more time, cookbooks that need to be splattered with hot olive oil in the kitchen and perhaps a decade’s worth of fiction fit for the sunlounger. I have tried a level of triage by airlifting some intriguing cases to colleagues who might be more in need of story ideas or interesting binding techniques for future volumes. Speaking of future volumes, wait till you see the May issue, which just hit my table (and is soon to hit newsstands, our online store and subscribers’ doorsteps). Keep an eye out for our new handbook on Thailand too. Tasty!

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Just as the “my son/daughter is looking for a summer internship in media and do you have a position for them?” season has started, so too has the arrival of browsers coming into our shops for something to buy their grandson or goddaughter for graduation. What better way to arm a future generation of entrepreneurs and diplomats than to buy them a print and digital subscription to Monocle? The best bit about signing them up is that rather than trying to hook up with a future partner via an app, they can simply look for other like-minded potential partners who also happen to be carrying a Monocle tote. It’s almost as good as a perfectly engineered arranged marriage.

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You have to go way, way back in the Monocle Radio archive to find editions of The Globalist anchored by Tyler Brûlé and Andrew Tuck. The very good news is that from Monday morning we’ll save you the trouble as Mr Tuck and I will be your hosts for a week of The Globalist from the Gulf. We’ll be serving up the usual mix of global news, business and culture but Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and Dubai will be the backdrop as we get a measure of what’s happening across the region. Tune in live from 10.00 GST, 08.00 CET or 07.00 in the UK. Of course, you can always catch the podcast if you’re not up bright and early. Wishing you a good week.

Enjoying life in ‘The Faster Lane’? Click here to browse all of Tyler’s past columns.