What @socks_house_meeting gets up to beyond the confines of his memes

@socks_house_meeting, Instagram’s purveyor of memes about hyper-local London trends, never imagined his account would become a widely shared staple of niche British internet humour. Not least because when it began, it had nothing to do with London.

“It started out with me making jokes about weird characters from my [undisclosed] hometown – the types you’d meet down the pub who would tell you weird tales about goblins or their favourite cider,” he says. ​“Then, for about a year, it became a moodboard of nonsense where I’d unload random ADHD mind coughs.”

Then, after he moved to London around a year-and-a-half ago, meme hell broke loose. In that time, Socks has developed an incredibly perceptive knack for picking apart the social tribes that populate the city: the clothes they wear, food they eat, wine they drink and their weekend partying habits. It makes his page an odd, irreverent, pin-sharp anthropological study of Londoners.

“People started to find the nonsensical lists of specific character traits and tone-of-voice quite funny, apparently,” he continues. That’s probably the page’s biggest pull: it’s mostly comprises made-up, IYKYK vernacular (littly lengy, fink like, tappy tap) that, even if you’re Not In The Know, still makes sense.

Are you a Salomon trainer and Kiko Kostadinov-wearing, £3.90 oat latte-drinking, ketamine-sniffing transplant from Surrey to the swampy shores of Hackney Marshes? A Notting Hill ​“smol supermarket of dreams tummy treat in the Diesel bag” girlie, or a ​“Venue MOT prin”, AKA ​“the litty club fairy that’s always skint but like has endless bumps and treats”?

Whether you relate these to yourself, someone you hate, your best friend or someone you’ve slept with, no one’s off limits for a skewering. Then we all gladly tappy tap the like button, because we’re all in on the joke and it feels good to laugh at ourselves and other people. But does Socks ever switch his beady eyes off?

“I can’t switch it on or off. It’s an ADHD thing that’s always on. But I have my downtime – I have my crisps and San Pelly,” he concedes.

His prediction for the littiest lengy trend to emerge this Great British Summer: everyone will start wearing Jacobean ruffs with Margiela flat polished heels (no more Tabis), swinging bell bottoms, 1978 thin veil black suit pants with a Sergio Tacchini track jacket.

Or Socks imagines we could see a new genre of gorly emerge entirely: ​“The fizzy CSM gorly with Christopher Moltisanti in season one. Maybe someone is taking a fish-eye lens picture of this very fit outside Canonbury station right now…” No doubt they are.

The last article I found myself thinking about was…

A piece was written about how it’s becoming a trend to dress like old people – not even normcore, but more intentionally dressing down in plain earth tones, simple but bland. It sort of made me think anything can become a trend if the right person says it.

The last new artist I discovered on Spotify was…

I don’t really listen to a lot of new music, but I found a fun artist called Chapeau Claudette. Their song Pass Auf — Kifissias Ave Dub is very cool. Other than that, I have a lot of time for Sofie Royer’s version of Melody, that old ​’80s disco song, which she did with Miss World and Peanut Butter Wolf.

The last podcast I spent hours listening to was…

I don’t mind the French and Saunders one [Titting About] they’ve been doing recently. I’d love to talk to them about ​’90s London one day.

The last picture I liked on Instagram was…

That article High Snobiety did about dressing old people.

The last TikTok I sent to a friend was…

Big Manny at the Polaroid factory.

The last series I binged (or watched a lot of) was…

I keep watching Frasier, Spaced, Red Dwarf, Bottom or Nathan Barley on loop. Frasier if it’s midweek and I’ve got a few hours to kill. Niles’ satirical little pokes, dress sense and complete lack of understanding of the real world is slightly relatable. Spaced is just a classic. The whole gang-with-flatshare feeling to that show is lovely and makes you think back to a time when it would’ve been affordable to actually live in a two-bed flat in Tufnell Park for £900 all bills included.

Red Dwarf because I grew up watching it through my dad. Craig Charles is hilarious in the first season, combined with Chris Barrie’s really painful finicky British mentality. Bottom is another classic – I felt quite similar to how erratic and all over the place Rik Mayall was, G od bless his soul. Finally, Nathan Barley did a fantastic job of painting a picture of London in the early 2000s, and how places like Shoreditch and Dalston progressively became what they are today.

The last book I stayed awake reading was…

The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt.

The last meme that made me laugh aloud was…

Check the first image pinned to the top left of @imjustscouse and go to the last slide with Hasbullah on the phone to his friend. It was that slide.