FILLING THOSE SHOES

I have to admit that I’ve become grumpier of late. Not that I imagine that anyone could actually tell, of course, as even I would have to admit that it’s probably my default setting. However, were it indeed possible for it to be so, even grumpier is what I have become.

I could put it all down to the drastic changes to my daily routine, or the fact that I’m feeling utterly exhausted, or juggling with one or two of my own personal demons, or I could even perhaps put it down to the turn of the year and the inevitable sense of the oncoming winter darkness and all that it entails, but, to be perfectly honest, all of that stuff is exactly the same kind of thing that pretty much affects everyone else just as much and it doesn’t generally transform many of them into melancholic old gits who struggle to see the silver lining to any endless banks of impenetrable cloud cover.

I am, however, beginning to wonder if I’ve finally worked out what the problem is.

I think it’s because of the shoes.

For the first time in a long while, I’m having to spend a lot more of my time actually wearing shoes throughout my working day instead of sitting at my desk in my bare feet, and, to be perfectly frank, it’s becoming a bit of a pain. Now I am perfectly aware that to many in the circles I move in, however tangentally, shoes and the acquisition of new ones are a huge part of their life and sense of self-worth and self-esteem. As society crumbles around us, perhaps we really are approaching Adams’ legendary “Shoe Event Horizon”. Certainly some of the closets around the world would indicate that this indicator of decline and fall of empires is imminently upon us. Equally, in many parts of the world, even the ownership of one good pair of shoes is an almost impossible dream, so I know that it is not a subject to be addressed lightly.

It’s just that my own relationship with shoes is a complex one full of a long history of mutual distrust with the additional factors of limited interest and budget-related thinking on my part to be taken into account. In other words, possibly to my eternal shame, I’ve never been all that interested in the stuff I wrap my feet in.

I can, of course, remember a phase in my life when my footwear used to cycle between “Green Flash” pumps (as my dad would call them) and the kind of zip sided boots that Mr. Spock might have thought a bit smart. I used to wear the pairs I had of these until they were pretty much falling off my feet, at which point I would go out and buy another pair that were exactly the same, and then spend another couple of years demolishing those. I can still recall that slight squishing feeling that you get in your socks when your boots leak on a rainy day, but I would still prefer that feeling, even though it could get quite cold sometimes, rather than having to break in a new and less comfortable pair.

Sadly the last pair of those boots let me down by not being quite so well made as previous versions, so that the nails in the heels ripped my ankles to shreds over a period of time and I started getting an almost Pavlovian pain response whenever I even contemplated putting the wretched things on. The boot of choice evolved briefly into a short phase of buying slip-on Dr Marten’s which was prompted by having to get something vaguely suitable to go with the suit I had to wear at a wedding I was required to officiate at, and some rather fine Tony Lama cowboy boots I bought in Seattle before being pretty much abandoned altogether in favour of cheap shoes from the supermarket.

Meanwhile, as the “Green Flash” option faded from my life, as they disintegrated around my fetid feet, my only other real experience of a “branded” product was with the black “Reeboks” that kind of served a dual purpose for quite a few years of looking a bit like boots, but also being a training shoe. I went through a whole string of those for a good few years before they suddenly became very hard to find, and the style got changed and it all got a bit disappointing. When I find a shoe type I like, I want to be able to buy it forever, but the shoe business really doesn’t think like that. I do currently lope around in some classic black Converse which I bought in Sonoma five years ago, so I suppose that my dalliance with branded footwear has tenuously continued, but I find that the flatness of the sole doesn’t do my posture, which was admittedly never all that brilliant, any favours.

Still, I seem to be getting a preference for “proper” shoes once again as I get older. Perhaps an awareness of the crumbling of the faculties means that I feel that I need all the help I can get, but it’s taken me a while to come to this conclusion after the many failed attempts at footwear respectability over the decades have usually ended in painful disaster. Nevertheless, now that I am having to adapt to a new way of thinking and living my life in all sorts of ways, I suspect that the almost permanent imposition of compulsory footwear wearing is definitely a massive source of my own “Grump Factor”. Once more I find myself pondering upon the laws of “cause and effect” and wondering which came first, the grumpiness or the shoes...?

I’m not trying to say that the shoes themselves are painful or anything like that. In a lot of ways, the shoes I’m mostly choosing to wear are the most comfortable I’ve owned in many a long year. It’s just the having to spend all day encased in the things that is becoming something of a surprising chore, as if in enclosing my feet, somehow I’m enclosing my mind, but yet I would never, ever, want to impose the sight of my own barenaked extremities upon the retinas of my innocent colleagues.

I’m not that cruel.

And I suspect that it would be a very good excuse for a disciplinary hearing, and I really wouldn’t want to give anyone the excuse… after all, the grumpiness is bad enough as it is.