There aren’t many trips to the local supermarket when I want no need to sit down but today was one such a day. I had popped in for a couple of essentials for a trip away, toothpaste and dark tan shoe polish; items as essential as the air we breathe. 

Toothpaste because I have a thing about dentists, especially since two fifteen hundred pound implants installed by a former cruiser liner crooner turned odontologist fell out (I have them in a cardboard box, trophies of failure) and another in Newquay who despite my insistence which tooth was causing me pain extracted the wrong one, I go out of my way, via extended brushing sessions, to avoid ever seeing another one ever again. 

Equally important as my perfectly formed if rather small remaining teeth is the patina on my footwear. After all, a well shined pair shoes are the cut and ‘tell’ of a chap’s jib. Memes that says more about the wearer than any amount of emojis or social media likes. 

For as long as I can remember, long before the internet and decimalisation in a time when people used maps and stood up for the national anthem in cinemas, well polished shoes were obligatory and, dare I say, normal. Buffed shoes a badge of European civilisation, a glimmering link between trouser hem and whatever it is down there. It’s why so many WWll films depicted sergeant majors demanding squaddies see their reflection in their burnished toe caps and I like many others of my generation lined up in the school playground for the morning shoe inspection. We’d even polish our football boots; wash and rinse them, polish them and finally apply Dubbin. 

For many the ritual of shoe cleaning has been as much an essential function of growing up, a part of a chap’s life equipment, as forging one’s age on the bus pass so as to get into A certificate films and lying to railway ticket inspectors about the station you embarked from. We just did it, no questions asked.

There was a sticky phase when cool teenage footwear dropped off the scale comprising clogs, high top baseball boots and something called The Rambler with a soft sole and uppers stitching in a loop along one side. Kim called them my “omelettes” and I could see why. Liam Gallagher, the former Oasis and icon of casual dressing has lent his name and enthusiasm, “now I’ve got my own version I’m buzzing…”, to a new retro range of Clark’s  Ramblers. Only 1970s mods, the dapperest of rude soul boys and girls, resisted the move towards unpalatable and unpolished footwear concocting the now hallowed pairing of turned up ‘red stitching’ Levi 501s with ox blood Bass Weejun loafers. 

The finest compliment I’ve received came from a commissioning editor on the London Evening Standard. I was to write a piece about grandiose Victorian pubs and having discussed the length and tone of the article there was just one question remaining unanswered. What would he pay me? He thought for a moment and said “I was looking at your shoes and I thought you’d be expensive.” For the record I was shod that day with a pair of light tan Florsheim wing tip brogues bought from London’s premier Mod outfitters J.Simons, then of Covent Garden but nowadays Marylebone. I can even remember the day I bought them standing in the shop doorway whereupon John Simons the owner greeted me warmly and asked what I was looking for? I replied shoes at upon which he glanced down at my black wing tip brogues and aghast guessed fairly accurately that I bought them some 20 years before. Re-soled numerous times and buffed to a dazzle and still in perfect shape thanks to another minor obsession, shoe trees. A local cobbler, a dour expert if ever there was one, remarked repeatedly that my shoes look as though they are stored with shoe trees in them, spoken in the tone of someone just informed their car has failed an MoT.  Shoe trees hark back to a time when people didn’t own many pairs of shoes extending their usable lives with regular care, maintenance and storage. I recall my father owned just two; black for work and brown weekends. They’re cheap now and not worth the time and care.

I have only ever had one street shoeshine it was in the Plaza de Armas, Havana while researching Up In Smoke. I seem to recall I wore tan loafers the shoeshiner selling me a Hoyo de Monterrey that was probably fake. I made a point of not dropping the ash on his work.

before and after – from Shiners: The Art Of The Shine

 A world of boot blacks and shoe shines depicted in film from the 1946 Shoeshine a story about a couple of street lads in Napoli buffing up to buy a horse to Shiners: The Art Of The Shine, a documentary from 2017 tracing the art of the shine across the globe. My favourite line in it from a shoe shiner  in the Big Apple who hustling a group of suited and booted Wall Street types calls out, “look at those dirty shoes. How long you gonna ignore that?” Here in the UK Londonshoeshineevents is a company specialising in corporate and exhibition shoe cleaning. 

We have mixed opinions of the Blair government but what most right minded people agree upon is that then as of now after more than a decade of the tories a Labour administration was well overdue. The Red Wedge became a sort of ‘youf’ alignment of writers, radio presenters, musicians and other creative media types planning ways to make a Labour win ever more likely. Paul Weller was the headliner at the meeting I attended in south London where one of the attendees at the 20 something strong table of activists suggested to general approval that young Labour types should make an effort to keep their shoes shined and see off that easy to denigrate image of scruffy socialists. We each looked at the footwear of those on the other side of the oval table tucking one trainer behind the other. They ought to have had a look at the How To Polish Leather Shoes film on the Kiwi polish website.

I am beyond instruction promotions so imagine how my heart sank when the woman at the supermarket explained that there isn’t any call for shoe polish nowadays. Who did I know that cleaned their shoes? 

She had a point and could I please have a chair?

For Nobby From Balham – a shoe polish sort of fella