Bookcases and shoes

Bookcases and shoes

Our old secretary loved those rubbish sayings. She provided the kind of secretarial support that involved typing documents under protest (don't like handwriting, don't like all capitals, dictation, that's better, for almost half an hour, then not more dictation) and handing them over so full of errors you had to allow plenty of time for correction, correction you had to do yourself, because she had red pen meltdown (took it all personal, bless) and returned the 'corrected' versions part-corrected and with new errors inserted, to keep you your toes and sap more valuable timeⁱ. She had to get all that work stuff out of the way in order to read the online Daily Mail and hone her white van man opinions. That's probably unfair to white van men. She'd be slung out of that club for subscribing to every populist idea goingⁱⁱ.

She said that if she wanted to know about a man, she would look at his shoes, and they would tell her all she needed to know. Needless to say, spit and polish was a good thing in her book.

My shoes say: “this bloke can't be arsed with shoesⁱⁱⁱ.”

Lets face it, at first, during formative years, blokes^iv, unless they're very odd indeed, don't need to take care of their shoes. You grow out of them too quickly. There'd be the trip to Clarkes and the grow-meter thing with the tape over the instep, sharp intakes of breath, a new pair of all purpose (school, family occasions, all other times when plimsols were deemed appropriate, that is, those occasions that fill small boys with dread) and the old pair thrown away. Then you'd outgrow those before ever having to polish them.

Then there was school. Far too busy times to polish shoes. Then blissful years, when I only had trainers and DMs^v. Eventually I ended up at fire brigade training school. We were issued shoes and two pairs of steel toecap rubber boots. We were told to polish one pair of boots and use the other for drills. “It's a wind-up” I said. “You don't polish rubber, that's just stupid. They're famous for wind-ups, this lot.” I didn't know that there was a hangover from days of leather boots (which were to return before I finished my service), and that, yes, we were expected to polish rubber. The shoes had to be super-shiny, too. Neither seemed any problem. Gary Champion, ex-Army bandsman, found shining shoes a soothing occupation and like chocolate. Shoes and Mars bar handed over, shiny shoes returned. The boots didn't go so well. We used 'Klear', designed to leave kitchen floor tiles shining and housewives proud. Great at first, but it cracked and crazed with wear, and went cloudy in the rain.

Then we moved from the Reigate training centre to Southwalk and I packed the wrong pair of shoes, rushing. Parade. Inspection. I did the best I could in a couple of minutes. Not good enough. The inspecting officer, behind me, tried to yell in my ear, but was vertically challenged and I was saved a perforated eardrum. He was clearly incensed by my in-shoe-shance^vi.

“WELTS” he bellowed.

“Whelks?...is this, like, seafood Tourette's?” I didn't know shoes had welts.

Then station life, and one station officer with a thing about polishing shoes. I never bothered with mine after training. This bothered him. I noticed. I began polishing my football boots whenever he was in the TV room (there were £1 fines for dirty boots on Saturday afternoons) wearing the scruffiest brigade shoes I could find. At one station the stairs had long, wide, straight strings either side, so when we had a shout (and it was a fantastic, busy station to work at) we would 'ski' down the strings, in a convoy. Usually someone would say “we're on a mission, from God”. This resulted in a whole watch with at least worn, and often worn-through leather on the outside of our shoes. I wounder what that said about us?

Colours nailed to the mast, it isn't shoes with me. Bookshelves. Record collections. Contents of the fridge. Newspaper of choice. I've a range of litmus tests, shoes isn't one of them.

Talking of fridge contents, Kiz's mate's got an all-singing, all-dancing beer fridge. He describes the actual fridge as the overspill facility, coming into play when there's no more space in the beer fridge.

i Spellcheck was partly to blame, and the Word software inability to add to the dictionaries. Yes, they may have red squiggles under them, but 'rooflight', 'sanitaryware', and 'loadbearing' are correct, and don't require separating into two words or hyphens.

ii At least The Sun is The Sun. The Daily Mail is a sub-Sun Sun for people who think they're way too good for The Sun. 

iii If they could talk, they'd be screaming “no, no, anyone but him” when I approached them in the shop.

iv Or girls. Patent leather means whatever that clingfilm stuff they apply renders polish redundant, and sandals, well, the leather's too narrow to polish, I'd imagine.

v With an emergency wedding, christening, interview pair of brogues kept in their box at the bottom of the wardrobe.

vi I find something extremely creepy about blokes wandering about paying such detailed attention to others' attire and appearance. Made to do that sort of thing, I think you should stroll about a bit, pretend to be impressed, and leave it at that. Really. Who cares?