The Curse of the Squeaky Shoe Days

Sorry for my little diatribe yesterday. Note to self: Do not watch Cabaret when hungover as three things will happen;
1. You end up wanting to buy false eyelashes and get a bowl haircut,
2. You wish you had a flux capacitor enabled DeLorean so you could live in 1930's Berlin,
3. You feel sorry for Sally, and then yourself, that neither of you can keep a man and then take it out on everyone else.

Won't happen (publicly) again.

I had a squeaky shoe day today. Squeaky shoe days happen to us all every now and then. For most people it's a metaphorical thing, it's those days you wake up after forgetting to hit 'snooze' and just carry on sleeping for longer than you should and then awake panic-stricken and confused and trip over yourself trying to get out of the house on time (panic + confusion = bruises). Or you leave the house when you're already 10 minutes late, get half way down the road and realise you left your ID badge to get into work and, more importantly, your mobile phone on the dresser (which gives you your only link to the outside world during the hours of 9 till 5.30 and is thus the only tool which has the capabilities of keeping you sane) and have to do a pretty nifty (read: 'slightly dangerous') three point turn to get back home again. Or days when you get this really minging spot one centimetre left of the spot you *just* managed to rid yourself of a couple days before. Or days when you forget to put your car park pass on the dashboard and get out of work to find you have a parking ticket (despite the fact that you need a key card to get into the staff car park in the first place and do NOT drive chitty-chitty bang-bang so can not fly over the barrier and cannot do Knightrider style tricks to make your car drive on two wheels so as to get through the bollards. Plus the fact that yours is the only burgundy 1978 MGB GT out of 100 cars and is thus fairly easily identifiable that you normally park there and normally do have a pass displayed prominently on the dashboard). Yeah, a squeaky shoe day is when things like happen. But it's made all the more delightful if, like me, your slightly below-par days decide to manifest themselves with the aforementioned literal squeaky shoe. I don't know why they do that. I wear the same shoes to work everyday. They're the only shoes I own that are smart and don't rip my feet to shreds from the outside-in.* I wear them everyday with tights (and other clothes too but the tights are the only things that make contact with the shoe itself), the tights may occasionally vary but are rarely anything but Marks and Spencer's finest black 60-denier jobbies. Plus, tights are tights so you would expect them to have the same effect on the shoe regardless... and normally they do. No sqeaks, no peeps, not even an arresting cheep. They're silent. As shoes should be (except for the click-clack noise they make on hard floors which is a sound that I have some weird inbuilt female-brain hardwired setting to enjoy hearing). But on days where everything is predestined to go wrong, where every sucky moment that is normally stretched over a week or even a month, is all compacted into 24 hours... the shoes, they squeak. There's nothing I can do except ride it out and perversely enjoy it. And not spend too much time away from my desk, walking around.

As such, I had plenty of sit-down pondering time today. There were three main topics of ponder:

- Having seen a schoolgirl with ginger hair waiting to cross at the traffic lights that morning and thinking how awesome her hair colour was and whether I could hope to achieve it from the hair dyes on offer at Superdrug, I was struck with a profound sense of melancholy that she probably now, or at some point has had, the piss taken out of her for her hair colour (a bullying staple that I have never pretended to understand). I then realised that I couldn't think of any instances in tv, film, music, real life where an American person has made fun of someone for having ginger hair. Can you think of any? It just doesn't seem to be a stigma over there. If anything, it's revered (I'm thinking of Mr Holland's Opus where the girl who was Cybill's daughter got told her hair was like sunsets... I think... it's been a while since I saw that film. Although, in Cybill, I'm sure she also got 'props' many a-time for her beauteous hair. As did Claire and Ruth in Six Feet Under. AND it was never an issue for The Plastics that Lohan is a ginge). It may be that I just spend too much time watching estrogen-heavy shows where no-one would even think to mock hair colour but really... it's just weird how it's so besmirched here and I can't think of any times when someone's been made to feel bad for having glorious red hair once from our trans-Atlantic pals.

- For some reason this lead me on to the ponder of trying to think of any instances that I ever heard an American person, in real life or in make believe land, say the word 'poo'. Do they use the word 'poo' ever? Is this a just curious British saying? 'Poop' yes, a million times over have I heard the word 'poop' escape an Americans lips but never 'poo'. I know there's plenty of words we don't share but it had just never occurred to me about that particular word before. I'm going to be listening out for it hard from now on. Just to prove myself wrong.

- Finally, I spent a lot of time trying to work out why it seems weird for a stranger to go into the toilet cubicle you've just come out of when there's no queue. It had never even crossed my mind until the last time I was in Leigh Delamere** service station toilet's where there's about 30 cubicles. When I went in the majority of the cubicles were free and yet, and yet, I was compelled to go into the one toilet that a woman had just vacated. She shot me the look of someone who's halfway between terror and puzzlement. To this day I don't know why I made a beeline for that toilet. I just felt this compulsion as I saw the door opening to walk towards it and by the time I cottoned-on to what I was doing I couldn't stop or body swerve as it would have made matters even worse. But why was that so weird? Why did it make us both so uncomfortable? Why did it seem so strangely intimate? If there had been a queue it would have been weird NOT to go in. Social rules and regulations innit, I guess they're mostly a force for good... It's the only thing that makes us all resist smearing slogans on walls in our own faeces (for instance).


*Although I have a fairly impressive collection of shoes that also perform this (some might say) fairly simple and expected task (those would be of the 'male' or 'mum' persuasion generally speaking) they tend to be constructed from leopard-print material, or have sequins or bows or 'Vans' written on them. Or, sometimes, they might have appliqued pictures of baby deer running through forests (I shit you not). None of which, you may be surprised to hear, are suitable for work. Everything else that would pass muster does the aforementioned foot-destroying thing (the pain of having to walk in shoes that have managed to rip a layer of skin off from various points across the sole and heel of your foot rivals childbirth) (probably)

**NB: Sazz's personally endorsed greatest service station in the country... mostly for the name if I'm honest but also for the picture of the manager 'Mark Slatter' who has the whitest teeth and bushiest moustache I've ever seen