Monkeys and Parrots 5.
How to display your bootlaces.

Quite a lot of my "Monkeys and Parrots" memoir -- most of it in fact, as it currently stands -- is about my National Service with the Royal Corps of Signals. There's a longish section on the basic training we had at Catterick Camp in North Yorkshire, in the freezing Winter of 55 -- 56. There are a few paragraphs about the rigours of kit inspection, and this little snippet describes how we had to display our spare bootlaces.

Spare bootlaces. The dividing line between spare bootlaces and insanity is finer than you think. That’s because this is how, in 1955, with the Cold War at its height, the Royal Corps of Signals, at the very core of the Free World’s communications systems, displayed its spare bootlaces for inspection.
First, you took your bootlace -- which was of leather and maybe two or three millimetres square in section – and coiled it tightly so that it became a flat disc a little larger than an old penny. Then, using a piece of black cotton, you tied it so that it would stay coiled.
That was just the start, the easy bit. The object now was to treat the coiled bootlace in such a way that the coils themselves – and, if possible, the cotton thread -- became invisible, and you were left holding a shining black disc. This you achieved first by ironing the bootlace disc on both sides with a hot iron, and then by polishing it with boot polish. The process was repeated until you had an object of beauty the real nature of which could not have been guessed by anyone outside of the madhouse which was the armed forces in the Nineteen Fifties.
From your two spare bootlaces you crafted two of these jewel-like objects, and displayed them proudly, in their allocated correct positions, on your kit layout.
The really, really, sad thing about this was that you could get really absorbed in the task -- relishing the challenge of producing the best spare bootlace display in the Regiment.
All of this kind of thing has been described many times, and I only mention it here so as to confirm its truth, in support of all those National Service veterans who are assumed to be rambling and senile when they tell their tales. Don’t trouble your head wondering at the sense of it all, because there never was any. However incredible the stories you hear of bullshit in the barrack rooms, don’t doubt, only believe.