Now normally when I buy laces, I go for ones 75cm in length. It would seem, however, that too many people are confused by concepts such as "centimetres" (and probably "length", too), so the manufacturers have taken to listing the number of holes on the packets instead. I could not, therefore, find any 75cm laces; instead, I saw ones marked 2, 4, 6 and 8. OK, well my shoes have 8 holes, so I got a pair of 8s.
Hmm. I suspected there was something wrong the moment I got them out of the packet. It transpires that those numbers aren't hole counts, they're pairs-of-hole counts. I'd bought what I would have needed to buy if my shoes had 16 lace holes in them.
Here's the result:
Comedy shoelaces...
Guess what's top of my shopping list for today's trip to Sainsbury's?