The Shoe Princess's Guide to the Galaxy

First published in Great Britain 2009

Copyright © 2009 by Emma Bowd

This electronic edition published 2009

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For Darcey and Max

The lights of my life

1. Shoe Love

Shoes, I am afraid to say, really do mean a lot to me.

       You know how men seem completely incapable of going down a street without eyeing every woman in a fox-like flash? Well, that’s me – but with shoes. I simply cannot help it. It’s reflexive. Addictive. Compulsive. Trainspottingly, planespottingly mad.

       
Why the shoe bug bit me harder than most girls, I can’t say. Does anyone
really
know what makes people the way they are? Is it nature 60 per cent, nurture 40 per cent? Or maybe the other way around?

       
Admittedly, Mum does confess to buying me an array of exquisitely pretty shoes, from the moment I could walk. But I suspect this had more to do with dispelling her own ghosts. After all, a woman denied the pleasure of new shoes an entire childhood is bound to ensure that her daughter never squirms in someone else’s ill-fitting, worn-out soles. Not a chance.

       
And as if to prove the ‘naturists’ right, both my big sister Kate and I were treated equally, and one can quite categorically conclude that she does not care an ounce about shoes. In fact, in shoe styles as well as lifestyles, no two girls could be more different.

       
From an early age, Kate learnt to tolerate me. In an affectionate way, I think. The sound-sleeping yin to her lying-awake-formulating-fire-exit-plans yang. And typically, in her uber PC fashion, she thinks that my shoe mountain is a tragic example of the modern woman’s sell-out to frivolous Western consumer excess.

       
You see, Kate owns precisely two pairs of shoes. When either pair wears out, she replaces it with an exact replica. Always wool for winter, and cotton for summer (‘Animals don’t need to die for your feet, Jane’); flat (‘High heels objectify women’); and from somewhere that also sells tofu and wind chimes. And she is supremely proud of this.

       
Our dad is of the I-walked-ten-miles-barefoot-through-snowdrifts-to-school-when-I-was-a-lad persuasion and, like Kate, is genuinely mortified by anyone owning more than one pair of black lace-ups. I don’t think Mum’s ever forgiven him for helping Kate with her first-year university Women’s Studies project: a rough globe shape, suspended from an apron string, made by supergluing twelve pairs of Mum’s shoes together and covering them in papier mâché (using the
Financial Times
). A ‘symbolic reminder’ that the typical world citizen is female, illiterate and performing unpaid domestic duties.

       
Family shoe battles aside, Mum and Dad still live in relative harmony in our childhood home – a lovingly tended cottage in Oxfordshire. Not that Mum can be found there very often. She’s always off to one of her many groups or courses. While Dad is happiest spending his retirement within the comfort zone of his study, garden shed and cable TV sports channels. It’s not unusual to find him in awestruck reverence of the quasi-mystical genius of some footballer’s boots. ‘Just how
does
he do it?’ The ‘it’ being the split-second calculation of the optimal trajectory of the ball during free kicks. Dad was a maths and physics lecturer for forty years.

       
Our suppertimes as children often involved Dad and Kate scurrying to the blackboard to draw convoluted diagrams of how a television worked, or an aeroplane stayed in the sky. To them, life is just one endless theorem or solvable equation.

       
Mum and I, on the other hand, seem to delight more in the chaos of the universe. Like Oxford Street on the first day of the post-Christmas shoe sales. I can still feel the snowballing excitement as the bus inched closer to Marble Arch. This was also my sacred ‘alone time’ with Mum, and always an adventure.

       
In fact, it’s probably true to say that all the most memorable events in my life can be linked with shoes in some way.

First Love

Definitely the canary-yellow patent-leather Mary Janes adorned with white appliquéd daisies and secured by chunky plastic daisy-shaped buckles, that I wore to Sarah Nelson’s fourth birthday party. They were like giant jelly beans – a constant source of temptation. I wore those shoes until my toes crumpled up so hard against the front that it was an art to walk without wincing. (A useful skill for my later stiletto-wearing life!)

First Great Feat

When I achieved the coveted life goal of learning to tie – without any adult coaxing, coaching, supervision or manhandling – my very own shoelaces. Scoff, you may. But to a five-year-old in the pre-Velcro era, this was the Holy Grail. My ascent into the world of grown-ups was deemed complete and fully accredited – in my eyes at least. And boy, was I hooked. No set of laces too difficult, no buckle too fiddly, no platform too high.

First Illicit Tryst

Secretly spending what seemed like hours hiding in the forbidden womb of Mum’s shoe cupboard, with my next-door neighbour and co-conspirator, Will – aged six. We took it in turns to try on four-inch red platform wedge sandals and fabulous black French faux patent-leather sock boots of 1960s vintage. Several years later, they made it into our dressing-up box; and we spent many happy hours dancing and miming the words to ABBA songs in them. And no, Will is not today a transvestite cabaret dancer at Madame Jojo’s. He is in fact a librarian.

Royal Aspirations

It has to be said that I’ve always fostered an uneasy truce with life. Not in a sad way. More in an is-this-it-can’t-we-jazz-things-up-a-bit sort of way. And so it was that for my eighth year on this earth I chose to write letters to myself, Princess Sapphire of Shoelandia, and post them to Shoe Lane, in the City of London. I often wonder where those letters ended up, but more importantly, what a podgy, gap-toothed girl could have found so profoundly interesting to write about
four
times a week.

Shoe Hobbies

Irish dancing (I
loved
those laces), jazz ballet, classical ballet and tap-dancing. I was devastated when demoted to the free-dance class due to my motor coordination skills resembling those of a dyspraxic octopus.

Best Advice

‘Good grooming and good shoes hide a multitude of sins.’ Mrs Kitty Trigby, expert on all that is sparkly and gorgeous in the world,
circa
1980. Kitty is a widowed, childless aunt of Mum’s who we
always
visited on our trips to London. Now in her late eighties (I think, though I would
never
dare ask) and in a nursing home, she is my shoe co-mentor with Mum. I vividly remember spending many happy hours perched on the edge of her chaise-longue, engulfed in an indulgent fog of Chanel No. 5, playing shoe shops with her sizeable shoe collection. But it was her shoe stories that captivated me most – of journeys to Harrods to get her ‘little Amalfis’ and ‘little Ferragamos’ or down to Chelsea to get her ‘little Manolos’ (decades before Carrie made them famous). I’ve certainly made a few more ‘little’ friends of this kind since then, like: Gina, Jimmy, Sergio, Anya, Christian, Robert, Chloé, Jesus, Patrick, Lulu, Kert and Jil.

First School Disco

Flat gold-lamé pumps at least one size too small. The only pair left in the shop; they were to-die-for. And I was not leaving without them, having saved three months’ pocket money for the pleasure of their company. I still have the pesky, tiny red mark from the ensuing blister permanently tattooed on my right little toe.

First Kiss (and I mean real kiss, not a fleeting peck behind the sports shed)

White Essex-girl court shoes, or ‘tart’s trotters’, as Dad used to call them. I really did think that I was rather foxy and grown-up. Perhaps it was the way they detracted from my definite lack of décolletage and screamed, ‘Look down here at me, I’m beautiful.’ Or then again, maybe not!

Pauper Period

I perfected the Cyndi-Lauper-meets-Bananarama-occasionally-mutated-by-Madonna’s-latest-incarnation-but-always-involving-a-pair-of-Doc-Martens-and-ill-matching-fluorescent-rolled-up-

socks look. Incredibly ugly, actually. But at that age, any negative comments were nothing short of the highest accolade and a sure sign that you were on the right side of cool. Amazing really, what a lack of money and an excess of spare time can lead to. Law students had the lowest number of contact hours of any degree on campus; I may as well have studied via correspondence.

First Broken Heart (mine, not his)

Mr two-toned brogue, caddish rogue. I should have known not to trust such a show pony. Never made
that
mistake again. Point to note: a similar theory applies to men wearing bright-red, yellow or purple shoes. Like a luminescent rainforest snake advertising his lethal venom, stay away from this predator.

First Big Job-promotion

Magenta Joan and David court shoes with two-inch stacked leather heel, dainty strap across the instep and square toe. These were later promoted to the esteemed status of lucky shoes, and have been resoled twice in an effort to eke yet more magic from them.

THE One

When I agreed, without a moment’s hesitation, to go on a romantic, post-dinner stroll along slushy, snow-covered streets in my kitten-heeled candy-pink suede slingbacks, I knew Tim was THE one. Shortly thereafter we moved in together – minus one pair of candy-pink suede slingbacks.

Wedding

Sometimes I despair that I’m the
only
person in the whole wedding-industry-world that understands the true importance of the wedding shoes. Quite simply, they dictate
everything
. Like the style of dress for instance – hemline, cut, train, fabric and neckline. I could not possibly have been expected to decide on my dress without having first chosen the shoes. Have you ever heard of a skyscraper being built before the foundations are laid? I think not. And need I mention the impact of the shoes on the tiara (or lack of), the earrings, the table settings, the music, the candles, the church, the reception venue, the invitations, the cars, the cake, the dance, the whole damn shebang.