SHOES

The other night I came home from what had started off as a quick drink. You know how these things inevitably go wrong. On my return, being a considerate soul I removed my boots on T’s doorstep and left them on the doormat. Lo and behold the next morning not only did I have a bit of a headache but  I also had no boots. I can only hope that whoever took them really needed some and wasn’t just some low life who would chuck them away somewhere. This is the second time that my shoes have gone missing recently. The last was one of my silver birkenstocks, which disappeared off the planet when I  left the pair of them on the back step after having fed my chickens. We hunted high and low and deduced that it must have been a fox ( who are keen on chewing leather) , but it was beyond annoying as I have no use for one solitary sandal. It reminded me of the old Turkish woman on the  allotment. Who remembers the grandma in the Giles cartoons? She was the sort of person who complained endlessly about everything. The fact that people had stolen her ladder/her vine leaves/her tools/ her watering cans /her bulbs and her shoes. Bizarrely she kept a collection of jaunty high heeled slip ons scattered around her plot. I never saw her actually wearing them and they certainly weren’t typical allotment footwear but  they were obviously the answer to the local foot fetish burglars dreams who must have gone to a lot of trouble to climb over the high fence at night in order to add them to his collection.

Where we go every summer,  there was an old man who spent every day on one of the wild and windswept beaches, scrambling down the cliff path in the morning and heaving himself back up at night carrying plastic crates and old floats that he would pull up on the end of an old rope. He would sit perched on the rocks all day , or meander along the shoreline collecting stuff that had been washed up during the night. It wasn’t unusual for him to wear items that he had found,  and my particular favourite fashion statement was when he wore one bright yellow wellington on one foot and a trainer on the other , setting the whole ensemble off with a necklace of bright blue plastic string and the hood that had once belonged to an anorak long since separated and frayed at the edges. He and his brother lived on a farm tucked into the folds of the fields on the cliffs above,  and apparently lived with no electricity or running water. From a distance the house looked idyllic, and always reminded me of the farm in” On the black hill” by Bruce Chatwin, but I have it on authority that it was in reality anything but, and that even the postman refused to go there after having been shot in the arm with an air rifle when he turned up unannounced one day. 

One of the many tricky things about living in Japan is the shoe etiquette,  and trying to remember what to wear and when to wear it without causing toe curling embarrassment to your host. Obviously and very sensibly, no shoes are ever worn inside and you quite quickly get used to ensuring your socks are up to standard and have no holes before venturing out of a morning. However there are then a selection of slippers on offer at the front door, most of which tall foreigners can just about fit their big toes into . These slippers often have writing on them ( or Japlish as we call it) saying things like ” My happy puberty”, “panda says cute fox is my heart”, that kind of thing. Japlish is stupendously fabulous and we became avid collectors of it. The favourites were a shirt ( that one of my kids still has) which has on the front in bold capital letters ” Happies made to keep assholes off Caramel club boys”, a little blue tin that I used to keep my money in with the logo “Shit. I like to drop my load wherever I go”, a T shirt we saw on the train which said ” My puberty has just plopped” but the prize must go to the genius brand of loo roll called ” My Fanny”.

Talking of loo roll, we then get into the loo slippers. These are slippers that on no occasion should EVER be worn out of the loo. To forget to take them off  and to come into the room still wearing them is akin to appearing stark naked at a dinner party and then performing a dance on the table.It sounds so simple , yet we seemed incapable of remembering, like when you are trying desperately not to mention something,  yet every time you open your mouth you come out with exactly the thing you werent meant to. I remember Tim doing exactly this  when we had been invited to dinner by one of his English students, who had insisted we went to meet his elderly parents. He ( and they) had as much character as postage stamps and conversation was excruciating.Thankfully  it came to an end as we were about to leave and Tim appeared from the loo still wearing the fluffy loo slippers. He bolted back in, though the damage was done and we made our apologies and left. As we walked round the corner of the house we saw the mother hurriedly stuffing the offending and now untouchable slippers in the dustbin.