Heels

Yesterday, on the way to the fields and anticipating not just an encounter with Donovan the Lonely Horse but also a soaking due to the gathering gloom above, I came across a double decker bus.  Not too unusual you might think, but in this part of the world we’ve only just stopped pointing at cars and describing them as horseless carriages, so the arrival of a bus is quite an event[1], especially when apparently stranded at the end of a lane it should never have been able to get up and only has steps, a field and a river beyond. Anyway, being incorrigibly nosey and there being a couple of blokes in bus crew gear hanging about, I figure there is most likely a wedding in the offing.  That and it is parked outside the church. And so it turns out: the young bridegroom has been deposited with the vicar, the building is in lock down, and the bus is waiting to transport guests to the post-splicing reception. In reverse, presumably. The reason it’s up there instead of a couple of hundred yards down-wind is, apparently, in deference to the ladies of this entourage who will be wearing shoes with heels and so can not be expected to walk very far.

Well! Does anyone else recall teetering home from the school dance in the snow in party frock and stilettos because all the public transport had stopped? Not to mention those hours of shopping with your mother (because she wouldn’t trust you to come back with something sensible if let loose alone and quite rightly because who wanted sensible?) trailing around in your best kit just in case an eligible boy were to be similarly flying under the maternal flag in search of longer trousers?

‘Kit’ then meant the most excruciatingly constraining underwear within which one’s newly acquired bosom and bum were being compressed to invisibility and from which stockings were suspended with the sole purpose of losing contact at critical moments, such as crossing the road or, in my case, while hopping around trying to haul my heel out of a ventilation grate in an indoor market.  Add to that the further accoutrements associated with the times when one ‘had the painters in’ and any notion of getting a bit of a shift on would be about as feasible as a trip to the moon on the computing power of an iPod. Although to be fair they managed that a couple of years later.

Our lane is a doddle in comparison. Not even any mud.

From Not Being First Fish by P Spencer-Beck.  Available from Amazon (non-illustrated edition). Second edition (illustrated) due 2018.

 

[1] It still is, at one every two hours and a route plan that looks like one of those puzzles where you have to figure out which kitten is playing with which ball of wool.