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8th November 2011
Many important people call for things in the press. I’d like now to call for our young people to take part in science, engineering, technology, maths and design for the good of the national economy and to help solve our Global Grand Challenges.
Only by having people love science, and not treat it with derision, can we expect to solve problems like global warming, the debt crisis, litter, the ozone layer and disease.
First, we need to inspire young people to study maths, science and biology at school. Why not create a roadshow in your town or a YouTube video describing your exciting project -maybe even a glossy newsletter to help inspire other youngsters to get involved? Someone important who understands the business side may see it and decide to mentor you or even make new products from your ideas!
Only when fresh young minds realise that they can have meaningful careers as teachers and engineers will our economy be healed. Owning things and thinking independently after all, are much less important than a fulfilling career with the certainties that having a nurturing boss and job security can bring.
Teenagers especially must be made to understand, eg by our most charismatic billionaire consumer goods manufacturers and pop physicists, that £22k a year, without distracting perks, is actually fundamentally better than becoming a filmstar or a football player. Better for society and better for themselves. STEM subjects can be seen as a form of healthy volunteering and good for the soul -not to mention cool. Who knows, by studying these demanding subjects with reassuringly rigorous exams and no pressure for creativity, they may one day win a business plan competition and appear pitching for investment venture capital on tv!!
Everyone understands that sciencey subjects are great fun as well as challenging. If it hurts, it must certainly be doing you some good!! Britain has the world’s best scientists of course and they set a shining example for young folk. They have job mobility so they work in the US and have such a great time there inventing science and doing stuff with equations. It’s very kewl “lol” 😉
Understanding the vital importance of all this, we will soon create a new white heat of technology and find lots of other ways for our young people to fit into the heirarchy of Industry (It’s no longer true at all that only redbrick third-raters work there. Oh no…just look at all the children of cabinet ministers vying to gain apprenticeships).
When young people are given jobs they can feel at once that they are contributing to the economy via their taxes -no need for boring office jobs when you can really get your hands dirty being told exactly what to do and making high-quality manufactured products for others to own.
STEM subjects have something for everyone. Keen, young, vibrant, creative types can learn to do the drawings and select nice colours. Maths whizzes can calculate the profits. Engineering boffins will fix things that break and girls will often be treated as if equal. What a glorious future awaits us if only everyone could get one good GCSE pass at grade E or above in a science-related subject.
We must accept that not everyone can be a lawyer or a banker of course. Those vocations require special skills, such as the ability to withstand the enormous pressures of being a grown up. Choices are a dreadful burden to the fresh, scientifically-trained mind. All our young people need to recognise where they fit in and to apply their burgeoning talents to the tasks placed before them, perhaps even doing a technical degree at one of our premier-league universities.
Yes, donning that labcoat could be their first step towards a bright, STEM-based future and who knows, maybe even result in the next Google or Microsoft!
——————————————————————————————————
(If this relentless oversupply of technical training, in order to keep down the price of real scientists and engineers, makes you as angry as it does me, see this article in which James Watson is quoted as saying “We’re training people who really don’t want to think, they just want to have jobs…We may be training too many scientists.“)
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15th February 2011
The transit stops on a Northern moor
A frown in a peaked-cap slams the door
‘Scrote’, ‘Screw’, ‘Snout’ and ‘Stretch’
He’ll show you the ropes, will our Fletch
Horseblanket uniforms, soupy grey
Crossing off sentences, day upon day.
In the upper bunk a vested sage waits
“Just do your time son, don’t grass up your mates”
At the slit in the door a twitching eye
“Do you like our abode, dear Mr McKay?”
“Pinched your toothpaste? I never would…
…your biscuits, though, they tasted good.”
“Job in the library? Keep your ‘ands clean?
I read a book once…it was green”.
“Two years of stur, then just go straight
Life restarts when you get through that gate.”
“It’s five years for me at her Majesty’s pleasure…
Then I’ll dig up that carpark, abscond with me treasure.”
(With apologies to Clement and LeFrenais)
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26th January 2011
(With apologies to Len Deighton, this is my attempt at a humorous, poetic tribute to Harry Palmer, cold war hero of The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin)
Insubordinate Sergeant Palmer ,
blinking blondly: what a charmer !
Searchlight spectacles, off just for bed ,
Reads your field reports by cocking his head .
But Harry’s file’s not in the tray ;
Even his Zodiac’s gone astray .
Another scam? Bird on expenses?
Clerical error, Ministry of Defence’s?
“Mozart and champignons, one-fifty a year?
He’s legged it to Berlin for some bitte beer.”
“A British warrant officer would never leave his lighter,
let alone official secrets, with some Russian blighter.”
“Isn’t there some rule that all our moles
should at least hold a Fellowship at All Souls?”
When the bandstand’s quiet and the cold war’s done
He’ll send us a postcard to tell us who won.
Has he really defected? An ugly rumour …
but I shall miss that sense of humour.
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27th September 2010
Some colours seem to have a strong emotional effect on me. So strong that I can’t imagine wearing red or driving a green car.
Bond. By 1965, the James Bond marketing bandwagon had even reached Ulster. Although the film was forbidden me, the whole idea of secret agents had permeated my consciousness and my mum bought me the Dinky Toy car (weirdly in gold, rather than silver). Its ejector seat and bulletproof screen have coloured my imagination ever since.
Despatch rider. A small-scale military motorcyclist and his machine were in this shade, fuelling my persistent interest in two-wheeled vehicles.
Invulnerability. My mother knitted me a jumper in this colour. I wore it and nobody dared laugh.
Man from UNCLE. Those model car people marketed another one, based on the silly TV series. Napoleon Solo clicked in and out of the window, firing wildly at THRUSH agents as it drove along the back of the settee. It made for a great surprise Easter present -1966?
Mrs Peel. The Avengers on TV had a formative effect on millions of young males, based on a) Diana Rigg b) latex/bondage c) Emma Peel’s Lotus in this shade.
PhD. This was the colour of my PhD gown on graduation day in 1985. I was wolf-whistled at by builders on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh (see invulnerability above).
Robin Hood. My first set of Airfix figures in 1/72 scale.
Sgt. Storm. A Mattel astronaut ‘action figure’ with ginger hair wore this colour spacesuit and had a flexible metal armature inside, which I snapped, causing me enormous grief. I still like the idea of scarlet though.
Shooting brake. A small toy car came with white plastic figures of someone in a cap and his dogs.
Messerschmitt. Not that different from shooting brake (less vivid). My father spent an afternoon assembling this for me. It meant a lot to me then. (The black and white ‘transfers’ were in beautiful contrast to the plastic fuselage -but you couldn’t say things like that in 60s Ulster in case you were suspected of being unmarriageable).
Ted. My teddy reminded me facially of my father. I still have the bear…although I lost my dad when I was maybe 9 or so.
T Gunn. A British Action Man. I later had to wait six weeks to receive the paratrooper uniform on special order from England (possibly scarce due to political reasons).
Tie 1. My first ever tie also had silver rockets on it and an elastic band to hold it in place.
Tomahawk. A plastic axe which helped perfect my Red Indian look one Christmas. It came with a floppy plastic knife which was less nicely coloured in a dark blue shade.
T shirt. On the way to the airport, one 12th July, my father realised I was wearing a T shirt in this colour whilst passing through a republican area. He made me take it off because he feared we might be shot. I sat in my vest, scared for the first time, that my dad was surrounded by events he couldn’t control.
VW beetle. Another model car which I wrongly though was part of a Lego set.
Water pistol. One of a gorgeous few pistols that appeared in our local toy shop. This shot water really effectively and also helped wire up the colour processing modules in my cortex.
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18th April 2010
Some counselling, tea and sympathy from a reformed Belfast hardman.
(Actually, this is Belfast, so don’t expect sympathy -and the tea’s extra).
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On being reawakened, I was aware of travelling in a shocktrain as it flashed past the numberless nutripharms of what might well have been the new Muungano province. Never sure how long I’d been in suspenshun, I quickly checked the system clock.
My son knew he was talking to a computer program and yet I could sense that he was in trouble -again. Overcoming the uncanny valley eventually, he’d accepted that this, my avatar, was actually as real a version of my consciousness as I had ever been for him.
His work for the FanWan Corporation had paid well (mostly in extra span) but had inevitably exposed him to a variety of neuropaths, over the course of his 75-year career, which had come to be suspected of damaging both fertility and mental health.
Perhaps his growing interest in religion, genealogy and costly recourse to the Ancestree machine were symptoms. His next assignment was apparently at the International Regulation headquarters in Daressalaam -the research institution which had hosted my own work on ‘population management’.
After the Second World Crash of 31-40, much of what was once curiously called ‘The West’ had opted to follow the Icelandic example and shun economic growth. Material comfort was manageable, subject to limited reproduction rights, and people started to seek alternative goals in the form of privacy, longevity and in ways to preserve some personal legacy. The first time I’d run the Ancestree code with a live person, it too became a prized resource…no-one thought very much about the implications then.
“I’m so depressed…the medication isn’t working. What should I do Father?”…the last word seemed extra significant to this fat, 42 year old -it was hard to remember that, as an instance of my prescreened progeny, he could stay flesh for another half century, before becoming greyware, like me.
“Well, suicide is not the answer. I know you believe I created a form of afterlife but I am no Messiah. Just because I couldn’t cope with the guilt of all those corrupted files and chose to upload early…”
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I tapped twice on my forearm and the control patch appeared. Once I selected ‘mymood’ the soot took on a sombre dark blue shade with scrolling pinstripes. I’d started the day feeling buoyant but now my heart was literally on my sleeve.
My flesh-and-blood attorney and I had only ever F2F’d once before, so something serious was about to happen to me (something lucrative for him). Most likely, one of my portfolio of employment contracts had sensed it was being infringed -probably based on eavesdropping by some rumour sniffer. My legal guy was really just a disillusioned former plumber with a degree from Senegal and a second-hand expert system -he was still using email for Christ’s sake…
…but he had helped after the attack. Some bloke had gone for me with a knife last year. He’d probably been disconnected for e-con or spamania…or maybe just attempted irony. Outnets are usually forced to wear those stick-on neurode caps -just so they can’t sneak up on anyone, without their intention map lighting up red.
(The same thing had once been marketed to couples: women could monitor their husbands’ requirements for sport, beer and other men’s wives. Men, however, found the transient patterns which appeared on females’ caps, way too complex).
Normally, my soot would have sensed the air pressure changes and the shadow of the deranged guy’s hand; but it seems it was distracted by some interference from a pedestrian meter and was slow to stiffen the impact region. I got minor neural damage in my right arm, which for a part-time Road Traffic Controller, was kind of problematic. A patch of nerve substrate had to be sprayed on the wound. Still feels like I’m wearing an extra gesture glove, but better numb than phantom limb.
(All that automated traffic management we’d installed had taken just two weeks to generate global gridlock. I’d spent the last 18 months untangling a 300 sq km jam, caused by a flaky subroutine and some 1derkind on a Sinclair C9 who couldn’t tell left from right).
Way back in the days of the late 1nternet, The Ministry had gone crazy when the first neurode machines became available. They came as a kind of paste: laughable really, compared to the spray-on we use today. Soon they decreed that every roof had to carry 1 sqm of black paste in order to gather met data (for unstated reasons to do with “National Security”). This was all funnelled back to a googleputer somewhere which could predict rain on any given patch a week in advance. It’s actually become valuable though, since my soot, for all its cleverness, would be vulnerable to a good soaking with the dirty rain that’s the only kind we get now. I had, like everyone I met over the last decade, become my own personal n-ternetwork. Personal, we soon discovered, wasn’t the same as private.
I stopped to get some buttered toast or some psychoc from a Provender in the street. Of course, it had a terse conversation with my gutbot and then my insurance policy must have cut in with the usual warning of:
“WARRANTY INVALIDATION (LIFESPAN DECREMENT 2.5 HOURS, APPROX).”
I was so mad, I had a flash of redcap and punched the Provender -hard enough to wake up some of those synthetic circuits of mine). Its self defence routine caused it to scream like a frightened child. There was no choice but to hug it better (the damn thing wouldn’t stop until it could “feel I meant it“). I made a mental note to unsubscribe from the healthcare channel but of course I was overruled by an actuary agent I didn’t even know was on my staff.
A part of me had started yearning for the old days when grass only came in green and it was possible to lose things…when there was quiet, with no threat of disembodied updates or warnings: no backchat from faceless smartifacts. Was it really too late to become a neoluddite monk?
Then, unexpectedly, it began to rain.
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Since childhood, I’ve always been overly concerned not to allow anything entrusted to me to be damaged.
When I first saw a micrograph of the surface of a polished mirror, it was a revelation. What the hell were all those ridges and plateaux doing on a perfect, flat shiny surface?
The world wasn’t actually as perfect as it appeared – it seemed sometimes as if a big fraction of that damage was somehow my fault. Talking of things that were damaged makes me ponder why on earth I was so uptight about imperfection. Well it’s not exactly obscure is it? That’s what happens when gifts, symbols of love, take its place.
We are talking about the boy who wouldn’t crease his shoes or allow his neck zipper to lie asymetrically. The boy who stopped building model tanks because he couldn’t be absolutely sure of the details of the springclips on the rear decking of an M4A3E8 Sherman…details that could barely be seen by the naked eye on the full size, 40-ton vehicle.
Even today, I get a sick feeling if anything given to me new becomes somehow slightly damaged…it causes me disproportionate but irrational grief. Probably something to do with childhood insecurity and related to my ongoing need to check four times that the front door’s locked…even if I’m on the inside.
There is no evading the effects of Entropy.
“Energy spontaneously disperses from being localized to becoming spread out if it is not hindered from doing so. Entropy is merely the way to measure the energy that disperses or spreads out in a process”.
(http://www.entropysite.com/students_approach.html)
This tendency for everything, even the hardest, shiniest, best protected, most perfect of artifacts to be degraded by erosion, impact, staining, scratches, oxidation -it’s seemingly unavoidable. Sic transit gloria mundi.
It’s certainly not as if I’m that organised…my stuff is routinely found in heterogeneous piles surrounding my littered desk. I regularly file things under ‘Official’, ‘Misc’ or ‘Other’…disorder is fine: it’s just neglectful damage that gets under my skin.
All of this makes enjoying ownership difficult. Things become a burden, since they require such vigilance to protect them from the kind of minor damage and defacement which would provide evidence of my neglect, my lack of diligence. The way I taught myself to manage this perpetual fear is to treat my stuff with ‘reasonable care’… as long as I haven’t actually been careless, I can attribute responsibility for such crimes to ‘normal wear and tear’…no more searing guilt, but the anxiety itself is never blunted.
This is what makes software so great for me. It exists in a realm which is immune from entropy (yes, I know the disks will be damaged by time, but the content is copiable without error…and can therefore stay one step ahead of the big E.)
I also try never to forget that some things get better with age…jeans, cellos, wine, Janet Leigh.
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Scene:
An elevator in a big city bank, professional home to Mr Zertnbacker: Venture Capitalist. He looks like an elephant seal in a sweaty, striped shirt and paisley tie under a Jermyn St three- piece suit(e).
Mr Z’s uninvited visitor is Erwin: a University wunderkind and therefore a particular expert in doing what’s expected of him by anyone in Authority. Erwin’s main hobby is his Asperger’s syndrome with which he unwittingly drives the world mad. He wears the same clothes his mum bought him as an undergraduate. Aged 22, his life plan involves sleeping with a girl and then becoming a millionaire mountain bike instructor -when his homework is finished. All of this is scheduled in painful detail in Appendix 86 of the business plan he holds, limply, in a Sainsbury’s carrier bag.
E:
Hi Mr Zertnbacker, I’ve been queueing outside your office for days. I want to tell you about a great opportunity for us both.
Mr Z:
I’m asleep already. Go away.
E:
Ok it’s a business where venture capitalists travelling in elevators can receive personalised, recorded pitches via bluetooth plasmaquantumcoding earpieces -at a premium rate. I call the system “Revelator.” It’s all based on my PhD -would you like to read it? I’ve got a LaTeX copy here on disk…
Mr Z:
You’ve wasted 20 of my seconds, which puts you $1000 in the hole already, sonny. When are you going to make me any money? SECURITY!
E:
I talked to my friends in the business school and they advised that we need to buy 150 Aeron chairs, a big website, a shedful of PhD’s, a Gaggia machine, some “corporate branding”, a table football thingy and a few TeraMips of computer equipment – most of that will be needed just to run the excel spreadsheet tracking our “burn rate” -whatever that is. We need to spend £5M in five, no-risk stages…it’s all in this 600 page business plan, Sir. You “exit” in two months with $50M, so it’s really good. Honestly it is. And I’m really clever.
Mr Z:
Shut up shut up shut up. Shut……..up. You know, you nerd guys think we VC’s are hard asses, only interested in jabbering meaningless midlantic MBA-speak, betting on businesses we don’t understand to scam the fastest possible buck. You don’t realise the anguish, the long expenses-paid trips abroad, the week of training and the responsibility we have to shoulder in acting as the engine room of the world economy. Take a second to think about our courageous efforts to spend other people’s money. And, just to show that there is compassion, integrity and real risktaking in Venture Capital, here at a cost to me of a further £2000, is the drive-by, the deal.
To avoid dogging or dotcommoding on me, I’d want all of your skin in the game. You’d sign up to a full ratchet death spiral to leverage an equity kicker on your mezzanine -before we even get to a drawdown. Any questions? Also, I’d need the usual due diligence package:
-two members of my family you’ve convinced to invest
-graphs, lots and lots of coloured graphs
-rights to your DNA, your house
-a jus primae noctis agreement covering your entire board
-a cocaine sandwich maker
I pay £5000 tops for a 95% stake -but don’t expect that kind of friendly deal until you’ve earned it.
Executive summary-
The Plan: are you serious?
The Technology: don’t get it
You: I hate -fire yourself immediately, you slime.
E: (disappearing behind the elevator doors)
Oh yes sir, thank you sir.
Mr Z:
Whatever
E
Yes sir, Uncle Naiman said you’re a real Commercial Bulwark and a First Class Banker, at least I think that’s what he said.
Mr Z:
Your Uncle Naiman is head of the investigatory committee on investment ethics? The Naiman-Shaman of the square mile? Scourge of the slushfund? The man they couldn’t afford?
E: (nods)
Mr Z:
My dear boy, let me give you some fatherly advice. Startups often tend to skimp, you know, on the business essentials -such as corporate entertainment, prestige motor vehicles and the love of a good woman (or two). Will $50M be enough? We probably have that in petty cash…
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I wasn’t born with oddly shaped feet. They just grew that way. It’s not actually the shape that’s so weird. It’s the aspect ratio of roughly 1.0 (which corresponds to HHH you’ve-got-to-be-joking ultrawide fitting). This would be hard enough to accommodate but my arches are on a par with Macdonald’s. For this reason, when I was at the sensitive age of sixteen, my feet were described as castors by a woman of my acquaintance.
Now there’s absolutely no truth in the story that a man’s shoe size is related to any of his other bodily dimensions, absolutely none, no, none at all. No….just because my feet stopped lengthening at size 8 (oh alright, 7 ½ would be a better fit). By the way, if you happen to be reading this in mainland Europe or the US, then apply the usual size conversion factors, taking into account the phase of the moon, room temperature and a safety factor of +/- the first number you thought of in c/deg.kg-1/ms-2 ).
The buying of shoes was always a traumatic experience so I have only ever had about 30 pairs in total (that’s including a yearly pair of rugby boots: studless and flayed to ‘nubuck’ after the first week’s use). Most of these fitted so badly they could have been swapped left for right without me noticing. Blisters? Let me tell you about blisters…..Scabs and corns etc just became a way of life (as well as a form of entertainment in a pre-gameboy age).
When dragged shoeshopping by my mother (a normal, and therefore guiltfree, size 6) I was always encouraged by the ladies with cold hands at the local shop, to buy pairs three inches too long ‘to allow growth’. Under this regime, I spent many successive summers shod in a variety of girly, cross-strap brown sandals with crepe soles. This meant that I never got the pair of Clarks Trackers that I so coveted: the shoes with the compass in the heel and the woodland animal footprints embossed on the sole. I had absolutely no interest in woodland animals, but the adverts showed boys splashing aggressively in puddles in a lord of the flies drama which had a terrifying appeal to every nine-year-old whose parents had cruelly denied him a Johnny Seven Combat Ranger Assault Blaster. This was probably to the relief of all woodland animals.
I was therefore astonished when parental assent was given to Desert Boots. They had been glamourised by association with the British 8th Army…hard to believe that these louche loafers could have caused much concern to even a single wadi-full of sweaty jackboots.
After having pulled out all the normal shoes (for those with feet like bananas, not oranges) shop assistants would usually pause for breath, photographs or to call the Guinness people. They then had to move on to searching for any suitable, ancient unsaleable spherical orthotic devices that might have been rolling around the stock room. When they couldn’t be bothered to keep looking for anything to fit my monstrous leg-ends, I had to start wearing size nine shoes in order to accommodate my width. My foot length more closely resembled a six. (A contemporary at school whose feet were size 14 ended up wearing black dress shoes, painted white, to play cricket in. They were big enough to play a test match in).
This had disastrous consequences for the development of my legs – namely a balletic, quarter-to-three orientation of the lower limbs. In ballet dancers, it would have been balletic. My body shape was tending more towards baleen. You try getting any exercise when you’re effectively wearing ill-fitting skis permanently attached to your ill-fitting feet.
My first pair of vaguely normal shoes were black slip-ons which I was entreated to take special care of (They did cost a whole £5 -or £500 in today’s currency). Being both a literal-minded and conformist child, I spent several days attempting to walk without creasing the leather: ie without ever bending my feet at all. It would have been a chaplinesque performance, had no-one laughed.
To undertake my duties as Usher at a cousin’s wedding, I had to revisit the eternal footwear question. After the usual traipsing around shops for a week wearing whatever shredded footwear remained to me, my feet emerged from the process looking like a pair of platypuses that had been carelessly playing too near a steam hammer. My new shoes were no less offensive than the beige flannels chosen to accompany them. They fitted really well -at least well enough for a bit of low-speed ushing. The leather-effect papier-maché from which they were pasted together was a testament to quality control procedures at the Viet-Min People’s Eggbox factory.
Way back when retro trainers were still originals and people hadn’t even heard of nike (still less pronounced it nykee) I got my first pair of training shoes. They were Pumas; white with a light blue suede flash on the side. But amazingly they fitted my feet (or at least after a bit of wear the real leather stretched enough to allow me to undertake a passable impersonation of locomotion). I was immensely proud of these and managed not to get them a) wet or b) stained for all of about the first day. Sadly, white wasn’t that practical a colour for someone who had to walk home from school through the northern winter (colour: Dirt). They were eventually replaced by baseball boots in sensible black. God when I got these, I felt as if I was so cool. It didn’t matter that my ankles never actually corresponded with the white rubber ankle cups.
Moving towards my version of adulthood, I bought myself a pair of orange slip-ons to ‘go with’ my green velvet jacket. These were to be worn to formal dances. I quickly learned that women found the charms of a comedy leprechuan easily resistible. The castors woman had a field day ridiculing these dayglo monsters. Eventually my father, no style guru himself, adopted them.
Yellow cowboy boots? ‘Fraid so. Seduced by the promise of cuban heels, I decided to dye them black and in fact turned them purplish. They still didn’t come close to fitting, even after several tortured days of ‘wearing them in’. It soon became obvious that I would have to seek the help of a podiatrist -just to get them off.
Roots. I bought pair of these natural, low heel, recycled high-fibre shoes whilst a student. They were made of genuine hide and as such probably alienated their target market who had by that stage adopted sections of old car tyres as being fairer to endangered species, like the cow. Anyway, they transformed the Clapham pavements into cushioned spring meadows. At least that’s how I remember them after the cowboy boots.
I then got a pair of black Nature Treks which were cleverly made from a single piece of leather wrapped and stitched into ghastly, knobbly pouches with external seams -exactly the shape of my feet. They came with airfilled plastic soles (sadly without any animal tracks) that three years of wear couldn’t even scratch. By that time, the uppers had long given up and of course when I went to buy a new pair, they had been discontinued -evidently not enough people had feet the shape of real feet.
It took me years to realise that shoes without uppers might be a solution to malign metatarsals. My Jesus boots (“athletic open-bed, all-terrain walk systems”) were worn once at the seaside in order to protect my battered tootsies from the stone shards which cover the east anglian coast waiting to become sand. They then lay in a cupboard, unwashed until the beach bacteria threatened to transform them back into primordial soup.
Once the swelling had gone down, I decided to finally bite the bullet and lash out on some handmade footwear. Wooden lasts were duly carved of my feet. Inspecting their contours from a viewpoint other than the usual one, of almost-six-feet-or-so-above, was a real out of body experience (the same effect as being told the price). Despite multiple resolings and reheelings, they remain the only pair that have always fit and don’t raise questions about my sense of fashion -or balance.
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