Shoes as art

These are my new shoes.
I'm seriously tempted to leave it at that and sign off. Because look at them! They speak for themselves, don't they. Yet I'm equally compelled to speak, not for them but about them. Or, rather, about me in relation to them. No, wait, not even that.
Sorry, I'll start again.
On Saturday I bought these shoes at Minx in Otaki. Because the sight of them made my blood race in the same way a wonderful photograh does, or the sound of the bandoneon in tango music. I haven't worn them outside the shop yet. The point is, I hardly need to wear them. I bought them so I could bring them home and look at them as often as I like. Like buying art. So there they've sat - on a stool in my bedroom, rather as on a pedastal - and each time I see them, I'm flushed with pleasure that they exist.
For the more practical minded, I'll add that they came within my purchasing power because they were reduced from $256 to $180. The blood-red element is wonderful hairy cowhide. And I'm not the only one to fall for its odd charm - Cheryl bought a dark green version, and Fern, ankle boots in cobalt blue.

Avoiding putting a foot wrong

It's exactly a month since I broke my left fifth metatarsal - that startlingly long bone connecting your ankle to your smallest toe. Any number of friends and acquaintances have nodded wisely and declared there's no need to ask how I broke it, all assuming I plunged from my high heels while tangoing.
I've taken grim delight in informing them that, au contraire, I was wearing gumboots at the time.

After a day's gardening and with rain forecast, I was filling the wheelbarrow with a last load for the compost heap when I stepped backwards into a void and came down hard on my buckled foot.
If nothing else - and it would be difficult to identify any other benefits - this last month has been a miniature lesson in empathy for those suffering any kind of restricted mobility.
As described before, I was incapable of using crutches or a stick with any degree of reliability, let alone panache. In fact, the latter was a further health and safety hazard, having slipped on the path between house and road. And I simply don't have enough strength in my arms to support my body weight for more than a few steps at time. After I dispensed with these, I walked flat-footed, to avoid flexing the damn foot. It made for slow, awkward progress.
My confidence was shaken, too, especially after the orthopaedic chap said to beware of uneven ground and walking around at night. And I was nervous of steps and slippery surfaces. An intimation of old age, this - the way your  world can steadily shrink around you.
The ortho also told me that if I was involved in a vehicle collision while driving within three weeks of the breakage, my insurance company would probably refuse to pay out.
All that I could have put up with with good grace - after all, friends kindly rallied round and drove me out every day for a latte and my mail. But what's really hurt is that the breakage has stopped me dancing and miserably restricted my footwear.
Heels have been out of the question. If I put a foot wrong, I risk displacing the bone, which would mean surgery and plaster. Anyway, they hurt - something to do with the pressure down through my foot. Even sandals have been no-go, because I feared slipping sideways.
Bad weather, of which there has been quite lot, is no problem because I can wear boots. But through those gorgeous hot days of Christmas, barbecuing and beaching, I was clomping about in sneakers. In a small way I was reminded of my childhood and the ever-present one-kid-per-class who spent his or her primary school years in a corrective boot, usually because of polio.

A childhood polio
victim, 1960

You just can't dance or feel good - off your own property - in gumboots or sneakers. So I'm signing off for 2012 with this beautiful specimen - one of the last images from my 2011 shoe calendar (go here to order your own for the coming year). Thank you to everyone who read the blog and/or commented. And please stick around!

Moccaloafs

The Writer has always said she would never be seen dead in a loafer (too preppy/suburban housewifey, and in danger of veering towards the dreaded boat shoe). Ergo, the shoes she had just bought couldn't possibly be loafers.

The Lawyer (rather cruelly) mentioned the term moccasin.

The Writer reared up in dismay. The thought of donning, let along paying for, a moccasin had never crossed her mind.

The Lawyer followed up (as they so often do) with a stated intention of consulting precedents, which is to say Google and a site helpfully dubbed differencebetween  This will also tell you the difference between deacons and elders, boys and girls, shredded and grated. The loafer/moccasin page is presided over by this unidentitfied chap (who bears a startling but surely accidental resemblance to writer Chris Else).

Whoever he is, he adds an air of authority and distinction to the following explanation (and I quote in full for the sake of what lawyers like to call "completeness"):

Moccasins and loafers are different types of shoes. A moccasin is a shoe that is made from deerskin or any soft leather. It consists of a sole and sides made of a single leather piece which is stitched together at the top. On the other hand, loafers are flat shoes which have no laces. A loafer is made from several leather pieces.

One of the main differences is that moccasins have laces and loafers have no laces. Loafers can be also called open shoes or slip-ons.

Loafers first appeared in Norway in the mid-1930s. Loafers began as casual shoes and gained popularity in later years. Moccasins were footwear that were widely used by Native Americans especially hunters and traders.

Unlike loafers, moccasins have a soft and flexible sole, and the upper part is lined with embroidery.

The word “moccasin” has been derived from the Algonquian language Powhatan word “makasin” and from the Proto-Algonquian word “maxkeseni” meaning “shoe.”

In the 1930s, the Norwegians who produced the moccasin-style of shoes exported it to the rest of Europe, which was then taken up by the Americans and was championed by the “Esquire” magazine. Some of the photographs had featured Norwegian farmers in a cattle loafing area. It was the Spaulding family of New Hampshire who began making shoes basically based on the moccasin design. They gave these designs the name of loafers.

Loafers are used as casual or informal wear in America and certain European countries. Moccasins are worn in very formal situations. Black and brown laced/non-laced shoes are in vogue. Though loafers were designed as men’s shoes, there are several designs that fit women.

Summary:
1.A moccasin is a shoe that is made from deerskin or any soft leather. It consists of a sole and sides made of a single leather piece which is stitched together at the top.

2.Loafers are flat shoes which have no laces. A loafer is made from several leather pieces.

3.Moccasins have laces and loafers have no laces. Loafers can also be called open shoes or slip-ons.

4.Moccasins were footwear that was widely used by Native Americans especially hunters and traders. Loafers first appeared in Norway in the mid-1930s. Loafers began as casual shoes and gained popularity in later years.

5.Unlike loafers, moccasins have a soft and flexible sole, and the upper part is lined with embroidery.

6.Loafers are used as casual or informal wear in America and certain European countries. Moccasins are worn in very formal situations.

Don't you love that six-point summary!

So here's the footwear in question. Your starter for 10: what kind of creature is it?

High shine

It was a household rule when I was growing up in England that school shoes were cleaned every Sunday evening. In fact this chore was one of my first encounters with New Zealand, via the shoe-polish lid. (The other was Kia-Ora orange squash.)

The result of this childhood training is that while I love the look of well-nourished leather and feel distressed when I see it starving to death, I hate polishing my shoes. 
Sometimes, if the sun is shining and I'm in the right mood, I'll line up all my non-suede footwear on the outside table, don latex gloves and set to work. But I'd really much rather perch on a high chair at a street corner, as I did in Buenos Aires, and have someone else do them for me.
Don't misunderstand me - I'm well aware this kind of low-overhead entrepreneurism is indicative of under-employment, makes at best only a marginal living, and isn't any kind of a career. But I do think there's a niche for a smart young person to set up a stall on, say, Lambton Quay. There'd be no shortage of customers and I reckon it would make more money than playing the guitar badly before an upturned hat.

Street-corner shoeshine stall, Buenos Aires

The owner of this stall was stationed outside a bank where the ATMs were out of commission, and he had taken it upon himself to explain this to every frustrated user. Meanwhile, he polished my old boots to a startling shine.  The pictures of Jesus and, I assumed, his mother and children were splattered with blacking, but every day  he must prop them up there amidst the tins, clothes and brushes. Perhaps to remind him why he works so diligently for so little reward.

Your foot bone's connected to your/ hip bone ...

The better I dance, the more painfully I walk. Is this fair? No, it's not! Turns out that 14 months of high-heeled tango several times weekly has produced a bursitis in both hips. And, predictably, a flurry of anxious internet research to try to establish what exactly bursitis is, whether it's curable or only treatable, whether the boring exercises the physio has me doing will actually make any difference, and whether it makes a hip replacement or two sooner or later inevitable.
None of this would have happened, I suspect, if I'd shunned heels from the outset and danced, as L always does, in flats. Now it's too late. I tried recently and felt so utterly wrong-footed that I nearly fell.
It's also too late because now I love high heels, and within 10 days will buying more, just for dancing, in Buenos Aires.

Comme Il Fauts are too high and needle-thin for me, so I shall try to avoid them for fear of falling in love.

Right now, this is my must-have pair - from Darcos. I saw someone wearing them on Saturday night at Nina's milonga and couldn't take my eyes off that glowing red suede and those sexy straps. 
Plus - albeit a dreary little plus - they look as if they might also be comfortable.



But then, look at these ...


And these ...

And these ...

Shoe porn

I went into my local independent bookshop for Tony Harrison's Selected Poems (they'll have to order it) and came out with this shoe calendar.
It was sitting right there on the counter. I had a fistful of book tokens (this is how you get paid for Radio New Zealand book reviews and my power supplier seems to find them unacceptable payment) and I said to the nice young man, "I don't suppose I can spend these on that, can I." But I could, and promptly did.
Each separate glossy page is displayed in an upright stand and every morning you move yesterday's page to the back to reveal a new delight.

This was my first - for January 10. Gray and black goat suede. And so delicious I could eat it.







And this, in case you're curious, is a poem by Tony Harrison.

Book ends


Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead
we chew it slowly that last apple pie.

Shocked into sleeplessness you're scared of bed.
We never could talk much, and now don't try.

You're like book ends, the pair of you, she'd say,
Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare…

The 'scholar' me, you, worn out on poor pay,
only our silence made us seem a pair.

Not as good for staring in, blue gas,
too regular each bud, each yellow spike.

At night you need my company to pass
and she not here to tell us we're alike!

You're life's all shattered into smithereens.
Back in our silences and sullen looks,

for all the Scotch we drink, what's still between 's
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.

II

The stone's too full. The wording must be terse.
There's scarcely room to carve the FLORENCE on it--

Come on, it's not as if we're wanting verse.
It's not as if we're wanting a whole sonnet!

After tumblers of neat Johnny Walker
(I think that both of us we're on our third)

you said you'd always been a clumsy talker
and couldn't find another, shorter word

for 'beloved' or for 'wife' in the inscription,
but not too clumsy that you can't still cut:

You're supposed to be the bright boy at description
and you can't tell them what the fuck to put!

I've got to find the right words on my own.
I've got the envelope that he'd been scrawling,

mis-spelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling
but I can't squeeze more love into their stone.



Tony Harrison



And a Happy New Year!

After a week at the beach up north, dressed rather less often in my togs than I'd hoped to be, I saw the New Year in  back in Wellington, in the afore-mentioned Keith Matheson skirt. I usually spurn New Year as a social occasion, not to mention frills and diamantes as decent apparel for anyone over the age of 10.
These days, though, usually means BT - Before Tango.
BT, there was nothing like telling me I had to stay up past 12 to bring on an intense longing for an early night. It's different though when you can tango your way to this daft, man-made deadline. You don't have to kill time to the countdown, the toast and the exchange of kisses with desultory conversation or pointless drinking. In fact, you want the time to go slower so you can dance some more.
At one point J approached me with a diamante in the palm of her hand. Yes, it had fallen off the skirt. But I fumbled the handover and spent several minutes searching on my hands and knees under the furniture before it reappeared in someone else's hand.
I was also wearing new shoes. I stayed in S's mother's house up north, and S had warned me of a seductive shoeshop en route. Naturally, when we hit Matakana, I screeched to a halt, located the shop - Heavenly Soles - and plunged in.  I emerged some time later with new tango shoes (not, as I'll get around to telling you some time, a matter of pure indulgence this but a practical necessity if I want to keep on dancing til I can get some custom made in Buenos Aires).

This is my third pair of footwear from Minx, and all three are danceable in. Their shoes are fun, various and reasonably priced, and designed in New Zealand by this clever young woman - Cushla Reed.

I can't speak for her entire range, but those of hers I own are also very comfortable. Three or more solid hours dancing in unbroken leather, though, was bound to take its toll. I'd been distantly aware that all was not well in the toe and heel department but it wasn't til I got home to discover three big, luckily still unbroken, blisters that I realised these body parts had been sending me urgent and repeated stop-dancing messages. But their source had been too remote from my dancing pleasure centre to register. Tango - the ultimate pain killer, good for whatever ails you.

A tango milestone

No, I haven't just executed the perfect ... er, one of these.

Nor am I ever likely too - I'd have to marry him.

What happened was that in a drive to reduce wardrobe crush and streamline the deciding-what-to-wear-tonight process, I separated all my tango options from my real-life gear and hung them in a wardrobe in another room. No more ferreting through hangers of ageing cardies, abandoned jeans and office-y dresses. Now I have glam at a glance.

Am I dismayed by this display of self-indulgence? A bit. Don't I think that with all the misery in the world my money could be better spent? Yup. 

I confessed my sin to S and was immediately reassured. "You're so lucky to have another room with cupboard, I wish I did. Now that would be a real milestone - moving to another house because of tango."

Those not infected with the bug will find this reprehensible, if not just plain silly. It might be both, but it's also normal. So normal that tango shoe collection is the subject of one of series of deliciously sharp cartoons from Tangocynic.