After a dispiriting week, I wanted to write about something that had been made by hand, by someone who cared only for creating an object as well as they possibly could. I was thinking of Christophe Lemaire’s description of Hermes: “We don’t say we do luxury. We make useful objects of extreme quality.” And so I came to this.
In 2003, I spent two eye-opening weeks with my cousin in Beijing. One morning, a hot wave of traffic haze drove me into a market where, still dazzled by heat and pollution, I bought a pair of navy-blue Gucci loafers. Possibly fakes, possibly passed through a licensee’s back door; well made, regardless.
Three weeks later, the loafers and I met up with my would-be wife in Delhi, and we wound our way slowly up to Ladakh, via Shimla and Manali (where we sat on a hotel balcony drinking birthday champagne and Laphroaig, gagging on counterfeit Marlboros, and eating pakora from greasy newsprint cones).
When we came to leave, a woman in Leh asked if her son could have my trainers. My would-be wife pointed out that I had a second pair of shoes she should have: the unworn loafers - then and now, my greatest ever act of ludicrous tastelessness.
The next day we visited her antiques shop, and in return for the shoes she gave me this beautiful, well-worn butter dish: a useful hand-made object of extreme quality. Inside the dark of its elderly lid, salt crystals from long-eaten butter still bloom.
Gucci loafers. What in God’s name was I thinking?
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