Today has been the dreaded Day Of Shopping For School Shoes
The prospect was so awful that Mark sympathetically volunteered to come as well, because we both thought that shopping with the children needed more than one adult to be present. Trying to get them to stay in one place and concentrate on one thing is a bit like trying to collect excited ants in a jar: you think you are getting somewhere and suddenly they are vanishing off over the sides.
It did not get off to an optimistic start because neither of them liked the idea at all. We started the day with a visit to the loft, where they were obliged to try on all of their existing school shoes and make an assessment for fit.
In the event it turned out that the only pair that still fitted was Lucy’s trainers, which leaked: and so I wrote down a list which said: ‘school shoes, play shoes, astro turf trainers, stud boots, indoor trainers, muddy trainers, wellies” and then just wrote: ‘x 2’ at the bottom. Then I wrote: ‘jacket and smart clothes for chapel, tuck, stationery, new jeans’ and Mark said that I had got to stop writing, before the credit card ran out.
I think being a shop assistant in Clarks during school holidays must possibly be one of the worst jobs in the developed world. We had got up especially early for the outing, by our standards anyway, and so we were there by half past eleven, which is practically the middle of the night, but there was still a massive queue of squalling children and shouting mummies, with exhausted-looking assistants kneeling on the floor in front of them looking very much as though they would like to apply a hammer rather than a measuring machine to the smelly toes extended for their perusal.
It was so ghastly that a lady with glasses on a chain shook her head when we said that we wanted to get the children’s feet measured, and said that we would have to make an appointment and come back in half an hour, so we did, and escaped into Waterstones where we accidentally spent most of the shoe money before we had even got as far as the measuring stick.
The measuring stick that they use these days is very clever, it is not a stick at all, unlike in my day, but a screen and a stretchy measuring tool, and of course it turned out that both children’s feet had grown to enormous proportions, and Oliver’s were so wide and flat that they were almost the same width as Lucy’s.
After Clarks it was Sports Direct, for trainers, and more trainers, and stud boots, and it turned out that Oliver had completely forgotten how to tie his shoelaces. After we had hovered around being encouraging and irritated in fairly equal proportions whilst he insisted in the face of all the evidence that he was perfectly competent, the kindly but weary shop assistant suggested that we tied them ourselves for now and then downloaded the Sesame Street video about shoelace tying on YouTube when we got home. We agreed that we would do this but then forgot when we got home, and now he is in bed, so we will have to try again to remember tomorrow.
Both children ran away and hid when they had finished trying on trainers, we were getting fed up of them so this would have been fine except that they had my bag with them, rendering us completely incapable of paying for the six pairs of shoes and four pairs of sports socks we were attempting to purchase. A pursuit around the shop followed, whilst the nice salesman stood behind the counter being patient but not terribly secretly wishing that we would go away.
After that it was pens and pencils, and then Oliver wanted to go to Games Workshop, where it turned out that the manager was a chap who had once worked for us, so a sociable reunion took place whilst unbeknown to us Oliver struck a deal with Lucy that she would lend him some money on the understanding that he agreed to be her slave for the rest of his life.
When we had investigated and cancelled this transaction he was so upset and our friend the manager so jovial and cheery that in the end we agreed to underwrite the purchase and didn’t even get a slave for the rest of the day, which we regretted later when we were both broke and also laden with shopping.
After that we needed a respite, and it turned out that the cafe in the alley at the side of Games Workshop had a licence, so no further recommendation was necessary. We had a completely rubbish dinner made acceptable by an enormous glass of wine, which helped the rest of the day along rather nicely, and I had cheered up so much that I accidentally agreed to subsidise Lucy’s tuck in Poundland, which cost me twenty quid and which I had forewarned her that I had no intention of doing under any circumstances whatsoever.
Then it was K shoes, then it was Asda, and when we got home we were flat broke and it was almost seven o’clock, and we remembered that we had forgotten wellies.
The children refused to eat dinner with us on the grounds that we were too stressed and grumpy to be good company for them, and vanished upstairs with their pizza slices.
We didn’t object in the least.
