My father’s Sunday-night ritual: bunches of shoes picked from the wardrobe and carried outside to be polished. Done without fail, with winding the clocks, watering the plants, and cleaning ‘the girls’ - the fishtank of school-fete prizes who awkwardly outlived their sisters by over a decade, creating another paternal obligation.
The standing orders of family; those things which must be done: love as duty. A military form of love; but unmistakably love, nonetheless.
His perennial favourites were a thirty-year-old pair of officer’s handmade veldtschoen shoes, to be worn with number 2 dress. Week after week, another layer of mid-tan polish would deepen the toe-caps’ gleam, to reflect the world back on itself. Resoled countless times, always with leather and heel-tacks to crunch on parade ground and pavement. Stolen from his car in France; the one time I saw him upset over material loss. He was bereft.
These were my first pair of Edward Green’s. I bought them to be my favourites, but that’s not how the world works; they turned out to be just another pair of shoes that don’t quite fit me.
The standing orders of family; those things which must be done: love as duty. A military form of love; but unmistakably love, nonetheless.
His perennial favourites were a thirty-year-old pair of officer’s handmade veldtschoen shoes, to be worn with number 2 dress. Week after week, another layer of mid-tan polish would deepen the toe-caps’ gleam, to reflect the world back on itself. Resoled countless times, always with leather and heel-tacks to crunch on parade ground and pavement. Stolen from his car in France; the one time I saw him upset over material loss. He was bereft.
These were my first pair of Edward Green’s. I bought them to be my favourites, but that’s not how the world works; they turned out to be just another pair of shoes that don’t quite fit me.
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