Look, don’t blow a fuse when buying your shoes

The aesthetics and ethics of glasses, shoes, Lewis Hamilton and Elton John

SportsDirect sells shoes, sports shoes to be precise, and they’re all lined up on wee shelves along the wall so everyone can get a good look at them and decide which one takes their fancy.

I just returned from the dispensing optician – my glasses are broken, under guarantee and will be repaired when a new leg comes in in a week or so. Mrs De Groeve also has racks upon racks, of frames this time, from which customers choose the one that suits them and then have their prescriptions inserted into so they can see where they’re going, what they’re reading and so on.

My lodger, Kurt, has glasses, and they’re vibrant blue and, occasionally, when he turns his head a certain way, I say, “You look a little like Elton John,” and, although he never himself considered the likeness, there’s little doubt that, when he bought the glasses, the optician will have presented him with a mirror in which he decided the glasses “suited” him.

People enter hotel rooms and look around them to make sure it’s clean, no bed bugs and that there’s room for their suitcase and also getting around the bed, sometimes with a view to chasing someone else around their bed, but it takes all sorts.

There’s a practical aspect to a sports shoe – it must enable you to do the sport you want to do with the shoe on your foot. But some sports shoes are bought with the sole (ha, ha) purpose of looking cool and that’s why they’re arranged on racks for you to make your choice, in order of coolness. However, the only view you will ever have of the shoe when it’s actually doing service is from above. You will rarely if ever see the heel or sides. And, in fact, nor will anyone else, unless you really do use them for sport and wear a pair of shorts while you’re doing so. The coolness of a sports shoe is in its view from above, not from the side, unless you do a lot of crawling to people who are cool. Possible.

Glasses, unlike fuses, are a fashion accessory, as are shoes. Imelda Marcos reputedly had the largest collection of shoes in the world, and had the right pair for the right occasion, including scarpering out of Manila – I suspect running spikes were the order of that day. But glasses generally – unless you’re Lewis Hamilton – have to fit “every occasion” and, on that score, it really doesn’t matter what they look like – they have to fit your face, be clean and focus according to the accommodation of your iris. Iris, with an “i”.

Elton John has had extravagant taste in glasses in his time, but I think he basically wore them so he could see the keys of his piano. I know someone who knows him and will ask. Woe betide him if he says he doesn’t know. Roy Orbison, on the other hand, wore his glasses because they looked cool and were a trademark. Glasses can even be like having a western as opposed to an Arabic name - get you a job at interview.

Hotel rooms need to be clean and spacious “enough” (I stayed at the Hotel des Indes in The Hague once, and I could nearly see the Earth’s curvature across the expanse of the bathroom) but, in the end, all hotel rooms look the same when the light goes out. It’s only a question of whether the person you’re chasing emits the odd “ouch” as they circumnavigate the sleeping quarters because they haven’t got their sports shoes on.

I said to Kurt, “When you go into a hardware store to buy a fuse, do you then ask for a mirror so you stand there with the fuse in your hand and admire the overall look of you and fuse together, as a ‘statement’?”

He laughed and said, “I get your point,” and you, dear reader, probably will as well.