Before and After

My sister has a pair of shoes that she loves… these brown ones. Apparently they are lovely to dance in. Though I can barely walk in anything with a heel, much less dance… even jiggle. I am more of a comfortable shoes kind of woman. (This is Daughter modelling the brown shoes. Being thirteen, Daughter longs for the day when she can wear shoes with heels.)

Anyway, for my sister’s birthday I agreed to get them copied here in Bangkok. The brown ones keep breaking and being repaired (though I have since discovered that she slips them on and off without undoing them: WHAT else would you expect? I said, being the sensible sister.) My sister says that they are the most comfortable shoes in the world. She said that she would love to have them in red; bright, beautiful, hooker red.

So I got them made for her at Liu’s Bootery underneath the Asoke skytrain stop on Sukhumvit Road. And when I went to the UK recently I took the new shoes.

What do you think?

Summer's over

I guess you’ve all got a couple of weeks to go – at least – before your children are buying pencil cases, pens and sharpeners and heading back to school. Mine go back tomorrow. (We broke up at the end of June.)

Son had done the great disservice of growing upwards and outwards several inches and his last term trousers look ludicrous so yesterday I made the long trek out to school to buy new uniform which is only sold at school and not in town anywhere. I still have the sewing in nametags to do tonight!

Today’s shopping was fun stuff first at MBK (Mah Boon Krong) followed by the most serious issue of school shoe shopping. We were off to Emporium, where the men’s shoe department has a section of one wall in the whole floor devoted to shoes. Just as it should be, the women’s shoe department is a WHOLE FLOOR in the basement. We decided to start at the bottom of the department store (with women’s shoes) and but when we saw it, I envisaged having to peruse every single table of shoes (there were hundreds of pairs and while this is fine when it’s for myself, at the end of a full day’s shopping I was beginning to droop.) I told Daughter to look round, find the right shoes and wait for us to return from buying Son’s. I guess that was my first mistake.

Son’s shoes were chosen in 3.62 seconds; finding the right size (45!!!! good grief) and paying took a bit longer. When we got to the basement again, I plopped Son on a sofa with our bags and went looking for Daughter. She was trying on a most unsuitable pair of shoes with a heel of about 5cm (she’s 12). When did I turn into this horrible fun spoiling mother? OH NO, I’ve always been like this. Lots of reasonable natured negotiating started in which she assured me everyone had shoes just like these… I told her I thought they were unsuitable, but if the school rules allowed a heel of this height (knowing perfectly well they wouldn’t) I would buy them. I rang Husband to get on the school website, couldn’t remember my password so had to ring school.

“They must be black all over, and must have a reasonable heel.” Miss Prim told me. “Do you have a number, a figure … a cm height,” I asked “that is considered ‘reasonable’ only Daughter and I seem to have a difference of opinion about what is considered ‘reasonable’?”

Of course the shoes were a no go – thank god - or I would’ve been in big trouble. Then we had to scour the whole of the basement floor again for a new pair that weren’t ‘eeeuuur, revolting, Mum.’

But, you know what? I’ve forgiven her because in the drawer I found some ‘iron on’ name tags, and she begged me to let her iron them all on the clothes!