Blame
new year's resolutions, but I'm back blogging after a three year hiatus. I
think I can promise it will be pretty sporadic, and considerably less theatre
based than followers of my previous blogs might be used to.
There
also might be the occasional swear word. I’m warning you now.
Anyway…here’s
a post about shoes.
It is, I think, of note, how many single shoes we notice
abandoned on the streets around our flat.
If it were pairs I could understand it better.
Sure, you
could feasibly discard a pair were you, for example, an arsehole flytipping type who
could not be bothered to walk the few metres to the nearest charity clothing
bank, or an inebriated high heel wearer finally crippled by the sheer pressure
on the balls of your feet*.
But a lone shoe?
Who leaves a shoe?
There has to be a story...
The lone trainer abandoned by the runner so desperate to
achieve a personal best that they would forego a shoe despite the inevitable
dog poo and broken glass...
The lone January flip-flop whose erstwhile partner gave up
the ghost a couple of streets ago, leaving its antipodean owner just enough
walk to decide that the uneven feel of a flip without its flop is worse than retaining
one only ever so slightly comfier foot...
Sometimes it is a lone child’s shoe, and this, for some
reason, seems particularly poignant.
I’m not talking about a shoe the size that could be tossed,
un-noticed from a pushchair in a way that could, frankly, happen to even the
most attentive parent – never mind your classic blasé latte and mobile
juggling, several grand of bugaboo pushing Balhamite.
But the lone shoe of a
five or six year old.
To me it always has something haunting about it.
*I used to believe, at least until my mid-twenties that
there were essentially two types of high heel wearer…those like me who would
hobble around wincing in blistered pain…and high heel demi-gods who floated
around on a cloud of leg-flattering bliss. I hated and admired them in equal
measure. I have since learned that they, too, are in immense pain but better at
hiding it. When a woman (or man, although I have to admit most of my scientific
research on the subject has been conducted during my oddly frequent
conversations with strangers in ladies’ loos) suggests they have at last found
a pair of ‘comfy’ heels – what they mean is that they can wear them for almost
an hour without wanting to cry.**
**my dear friend, professional heel wearer Jenni Crane may
possibly be the exception here – but I’m still not convinced she hasn’t just
developed an extra-ordinary avengers level pain threshold…