“Shall I put these in the bin for you?” asked the nice lady in Clarks, holding up the shoes Oliver had taken off to try on new school shoes.
“Yes please,” Oliver said, darkly, glaring at his neglectful mother who had allowed his footwear to get into such a dreadful state.
I don’t know how his shoes have got into such an awful mess, he has only had them since September and I absolutely promise you, they have been waxed and polished and sprayed with waterproofing every single time I have set eyes on them during their short life. Despite this they had split and scuffed and frayed and worn. They would not have looked out of place on the ends of Worzel Gummidge’s straw-filled legs.
It was last week when Mark noticed them on his feet and made an executive decision about scrapping them as soon as reasonably practicable.
It has taken me a week to work myself up to it. Oliver is a dear little boy, but not a Happy Shopper, and he was not at all delighted when I broke the news to him this morning.
“How about we go to Game as well,” he said hopefully, “then I don’t need to whinge about it.”
This seemed to me to be a good deal, and so we went to Sports Direct to get cricket shoes, which they didn’t have, and then on to Clarks, where he tried on G fittings and F fittings, G fittings with insoles in, walking round and round the shop every time with an expression of intense concentration whilst he though hard about how his feet were feeling: and finally settled on the F fittings with the insoles, and I paid the bill with relief.
We went to Game then, which was the serious part of the shopping trip, and I stood back whilst he chose some unpleasantly unsuitable looking games and got into a discussion with the manager about the Coming Soon This October Virtual Reality Headset.
This is a nausea-inducing device designed to make you think you are in a shark tank or a war zone or other equally undesirable locations, the point being, which rather baffles me, that you can be there without actually being there. I really don’t understand this at all. If nobody in their right mind would actually want to be in a shark tank I really can’t appreciate the enjoyment involved in just imagining you are in one, fancy having all that anxiety for nothing.
It would appear that Oliver does have a burning desire to be in a shark tank or a war zone, because he is longing for a Virtual Reality Headset with his whole soul.
They are coming out in limited numbers and you have got to put down a deposit. All of the First Phase headsets have been sold already, mostly, the manager admitted, to the shop’s staff.
Oliver thought very hard about it and eventually decided that he would put down his last twenty quid as a deposit on a Second Phase headset and become the Hundred And First person in Kendal to really own one.
“How are you going to get the other three hundred and sixty quid?” I enquired on the way out of the shop.
We pondered this difficulty.
I rejected his optimistic suggestion of busking, given that even if he doubled his current number of notes on the flute before the summer it would still not add up to an octave, and certainly it would not add up to three hundred and sixty quid.
In the end we thought of cleaning cars. He thought that maybe Daddy would teach him how to clean a car really well and then he could clean people’s cars for money. I said that if he was really good then I would be his marketing manager and find him some taxis to polish, but only, I warned, if he was really good at it, any dust on the parcel shelf and he could forget it.
He thought very hard.
“I really, really want it, so I’ll have to,” he decided.
There followed some frowning concentration and waggling of fingers whilst he calculated the potential profits which might result from self-employment. At the end of which he had worked out that if he worked really, really hard all summer he could earn enough for a headset and some Virtual Reality games to go in it.
His jaw set.
Of course summer is still a long time away.
Watch this space.
