I’m quite fond of the smell of shoe polish in the morning. I’d hang out in shoe menders more if I had the time. On my annual visit a few weeks ago to the best little shoe mender’s in Dublin, I sat on a high stool – while the owner cut some insoles for me – taking in the sights and smells. I like to look at the Good Baby Shoes in the window, all leather, all different colours, heirloom shoes. A passing American came in to enquire whether his shoe/runner type footwear could be soled?
“Awesome,” he said when he was told that they could. Getting holy soles fixed on your shoes is like getting brand new ones for a fraction of the price. It puts pep in your step.
One of my recession concessions was getting my two pairs of winter boots (one brown and one black, I’m kind of crazy like that) fixed up every year instead of spending money on new ones. It helps that I love these boots and that they are what I would categorise as Good Boots as opposed to Waste of Money Boots. The brown ones are battered leather, the kind that looks lovelier the more battered and beaten down it gets. The black ones are half Doc Marten punk/half Victorian lady which give me that devil-may-care edge I like to display on my feet.
Nobody-else-really-cares or notices this edge of course. But that’s the power of the Good Shoe, especially the Comfortable Good Shoe.
They can act like armour, allowing you to stride through the day feeling stronger and happier about everything. Some people feel this way about high heels but they just make me fall over which is not conducive to striding about feeling powerful.
The shoe shop owner fixed my Brown Boots on the spot. The Devil-May-Care Boots were a bigger job. The side zip traditionally breaks every year as soon as I take them out of their plastic box under the bed but the rest of the boot stays sturdy.
He gave me a docket to mind for a few days while he sourced the right zip. I’m scatty, as you might have noticed. I am not good with any kind of important paper documents from dockets, to forms from the school about the children’s eye test, to borrowed bank notes. Later that day, for example, I borrowed a tenner from a colleague to buy a sandwich. By the time I bought the sandwich I had lost the tenner.
Somebody else bought me lunch that day which I’ll have to pay back at some point. So it was not a good day, accounts wise.
Obviously, I lost the shoe docket. But I tend to think of dockets from dry cleaners, shoe menders and coat check people as being more symbolic than anything else. Anyway, I knew I could go back to the shoe mender’s and tell him he was fixing the zip on my Doc Marten Victorian Lady boots and I knew he’d rummage under the counter and find them. I never really needed the docket.
It’s been a few weeks now though. They are still under the counter, all spruced up with a new zip and nowhere to go. And in the meantime I did something which is my own personal harbinger of boom. I bought new boots. New Boots. Nice Boots. Also, possibly, Waste of Good Money Boots. They have suede bits which even after a week are scuffed and while they have given me that happy, confident pep in my step, I know they are not boots I can bring back to the menders every year for the next five years.
I wore the boots to give my first lecture. And I'm not giving all the credit to the boots, but I sailed through it and now believe I could actually be a lecturer if I put my mind to it.
I wore the boots to my sister's house where she had the night before given birth in a pool in her sitting room to her second daughter Iseult Áine Ingle Holmes. She was watching House of Cards in bed with the baby on her breast when I called.
“Ah, hello little Iseult,” I cooed pronouncing it E-Seult because I don’t know anyone else of that name and that’s how I thought it would be pronounced. “Iss-Eult,” my sister corrected. “Iss-Eult,” I cooed knowing I would get it wrong a few hundred times again before I got it right.
“Wear Good Boots and get them mended instead of buying new ones, Iss-Eult,” I whispered to my tiny niece, my mother’s seventeenth grandchild.
Next day I picked up my Good Boots from the menders and bought Iss-Eult some Good Baby Shoes so she might always remember what her scatty Auntie Róisín told her when she was barely a day old.
roisin@irishtimes.com