Shoes and Horses

A lot of ranting on Saturday! In order to get a proper perspective on the Derby I purchased a fair spread of newspapers and settled down at the kitchen table to find the likely winner. I concentrated my attention on The Times which is a newspaper I rarely read, having been suckered into “subscribing” to the Telegraph some years ago and not really knowing how to stop the standing order thing. I felt sure that the illustrious “Thunderer” would be the place to get proper, authoritative advice.

God help us, what a mess The Times has become! The tabloid format just doesn’t lend itself to a weekend edition. Little supplements and advertising brochures seem to fly from the pages, littering the kitchen floor. I fought my way from section to section and, when I found the appropriate sports section featuring the Epsom card, the Derby runners were not to be found (having been despatched to another part of this mysterious – and almost impossible to navigate – newspaper). My eventual wager (on “The Geezer”) didn’t do me any good either, and I’ll stick to broadsheets on Saturdays in future.

Sunday’s Telegraph (not a great paper, but at least it’s the right shape) carried an interesting promotion for olive oil – sold in those wine box things that have silver bladders and little plastic taps (sounds a bit like the Ranting Nappa after his next operation).

It reminded me of a rather puzzling dream I had had earlier in the week. In the dream I had suddenly stopped being a down-trodden bookseller and was now employed by an enterprising American specialist “wine box” company. My job was to market a range of really decent wines – in boxes – and to try to change the normal prejudice of serious wine drinkers against the boxes - “Hmm, Chateau Latour 1997 - three litres in a "Stowells of Chelsea" box - well, I'll be damned!"

Intrigued by the dream I did some research on the Internet. Sure enough there have been attempts to upgrade the status of wine boxes, notably in Australia where the boxes are called “wine casks”. Sadly the Australian effort coincideded with the realization by the wrong kind of serious drinkers that the “casks” mean greater quantity, good value and that if you drop them they don’t break.

The Australian government is now considering a higher band of taxation for wine sold in “casks” to try and put an end to the yahoo behaviour of these serious wine box devotees, many of whom are delinquent.

Also in Sunday’s Telegraph was a piece about the French shoe-lady Olga Berluti who claims “A man’s feet never lie”. The mother-in-law (God rest her) used to say that you “can always tell a man by his shoes”. So I suppose it is time to stand up and be counted:

Today I am wearing (as booksellers do) a pair of old, scruffy, unpolished black shoes with frayed laces. Yes, down-at-heel would be an apt description. Look inside for the inner sole and you will also find degeneration. The once sealed welts have cracks, and as for the “uppers”, well, enough of this nonsense…