Is it out of hand?

Because I am teaching Ann-at-work to knit (and yes, she's doing very well, thanks for asking) and because she wants to knit a secret thing - I am saying no more - "Walls have ears" - and because it's about time we got on to some skinny (technical term) yarn, more suited to the actual project, I started to look for some left-over sock yarn. I want to stress here, for the benefit of any walls that might be listening, that she is not, repeat not, knitting a sock.

I don't knit that many socks. I like the idea of knitting socks - the portability; the fact that they are soon finished (ha!); the fact that they are mindless knitting (double ha!); the wearing of said socks at the finish; but I am not over-enamoured of the actual fact of knitting them. Nevertheless, when I look back I have knitted socks for myself, for 'im indoors and for #1 son (#1 daughter is, inexplicably, out-of-the-loop) but I normally do toe-up socks, which means I don't have lots of left-overs. I just knit until I run out of yarn. There must be some amount of yarn, however small, remaining. I looked in the hanging baskets. I looked in the wicker laundry basket (not the laundry laundry basket, the yarn laundry basket). I looked in the boxes, carefully labelled - "Hat Yarn", "Novelty Yarn", "Shetland 2-ply jumper weight yarn", the very descriptive "White Yarn". Naturally, there wasn't a box handily labelled "Sock Yarn".

So, I had to look in the behind-the-sofa stash. Now, strictly speaking, this is not "Stash" at all. This is stuff that I bought and put behind the sofa before it got into the stash:



I think it was Oscar Wilde who quipped, "If all the girls on Brighton Pier were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised." If my stash were laid end to end would it put "a girdle round the earth", reach to the moon, be the length of Brighton Pier, the height of Blackpool Tower??

And before anyone starts, let me say the words "pot", "kettle" and "black".

So, is it out of hand?