Slippers

We had a visit the other week from Mrs FLN and the reindeers Robbie and Rudolf. And great too it was to see them.

She happened to let slip whilst she was here how FLN and her were often on the edge of their seats when they came to see us because of my life long habit of twirling a slipper from the end of my foot. Wondering when it would drop off!

It is hard to describe how skilful this habit in fact is. It has taken a lifetime to perfect. A bit like a footballer who can do hundreds of keepmeuppies.

I have a thing with slippers. I even took a pair to my baptism and their condition was the one thing which Teapot's granny remembered ever afterwards. But I digress. Slipper twirling is a kind of fidgeting you may say, or I may say, a subtle piece of ankle exercise.

Which made me think of that seminal paper written in 1885 by Francis Galton called "the measure of fidget". He observed from watching students in lectures that the more boring they found it the more their bodies moved from the perpendicular towards the horizontal or their bodies swayed from side to side. A separate study by the Reverend Septimus Fogg of sermons days in Methodist Chapels in Lancashire undertaken in the 1950s confirmed this theory. He even developed a boredom scale called "the measure of the yawn"

Timelord however believes that the fidget is not always bored. On the contrary the fidget may be full of galactic energy just ticking over like a well tuned engine waiting to click into gear.

The question you may ask is, which is which...