The animal is knitted in three dimensions, and it hugs your ankle

This is what stops people. The animal is not a picture printed on the fabric. It is a whole little knitted creature, made in the round, attached to the sock, with arms that actually wrap around your leg. My sloth holds onto my shin with two long arms, one round the ankle, one reaching up, with little knitted fingers, and a face that would soften a traffic warden. It is far better made than a funny sock has any right to be, and that is precisely why it works past the first laugh.

Feet up of an evening. The sloth hangs on whether you have earned a sit down or not.

There is a whole menagerie, fifteen of them

I counted. Fifteen animals. A sloth. A ginger tabby cat with proper whiskers and a striped tail that curls round your leg. The Highland cow from the shoe shop, sitting on the foot with its fringe over its eyes. A panda with black arms wrapped right round the ankle. A rabbit with one long soft ear hanging down. And that is me stopping at five, because the full list would take the rest of the page. Half the pleasure of these socks is deciding which animal belongs to which person you know, and I warn you now, you will start assigning them to people whether you mean to or not.

Three of the fifteen, laid out on the bed. Deciding who gets what is a genuine evening’s entertainment.

They are properly warm, not decoratively warm

Underneath the animal is a genuinely thick knitted sock, ribbed at the leg, dense at the foot, the sort of thing you actually want on the first cold evening of autumn when the heating argument has not yet been won. These are the socks I put on when we get back from walking Wilf in the drizzle, and they do the job the grey pile never quite managed. Cosy is the honest word for it. Warm feet, cheerful ankle, and no compromise between the two.

Soft enough that you forget the clever part is even there

My worry, looking at that little cow in the shoe shop, was that a knitted animal on a sock would drive me mad inside an hour, rubbing at the ankle or catching on everything. It does not. The whole sock is soft, the animal included, and it sits on the outside of the leg where it bothers nothing and nobody. I have worn the sloths through whole evenings, and whole mornings after, and the only time I remember the sloth is there is when somebody points at it.

The soles have little grips, which at our age is not a small thing

Turn them over and the soles have small grips on them, so you are steady on a smooth kitchen floor or the laminate in the hall in a way that ordinary socks in this house have never been. I pad about on our kitchen tiles making the morning tea without that little skate you get in worn old socks, and I appreciate it every single day. It is the detail that tells you somebody designed these properly, rather than just sewing a cow to a sock and calling it a day.

The Highland cow, close to. Horns, fringe, hooves. Somebody sat down and got this right.

They are the easiest present I have found in years

Fifteen animals, two sizes, and the smaller covers most of the women you know while the larger covers the men. That is the whole gift problem solved from one page. There is a panda already wrapped for our granddaughter, a black cat put away for my sister June, and I have not ruled out the bat for Brian, who claims he does not want any and has been unusually interested in mine. If somebody in your family is impossible to buy for, I promise you there is an animal on that page with their name on it.