SHOEHORN

Oho! It turns out, I’m of the age where I need a shoehorn! I know, what is the world coming to when you can no longer shout loud enough to round up your shoes?

Well anyway. The backs of my trainers keep getting damaged by me lazily sliding my chunky feet into them and expecting them to pop back into shape. The solution of course, is the slenderly cupped length of wood or plastic that eases the heel into the mouth of the shoe. The shoehorn.

I don’t know why I think of them as old-fashioned. Maybe it’s because I’ve never needed one before, maybe it just seems like ‘shoehorn’ is an old-fashioned word, like antimacassar or housecoat. There is something Dickensian about it, don’t you think?

It is in common use though, as a verb - mostly when something that doesn’t belong is tightly wedged between two things that do - like deliberately bringing up salaries at a dinner party, or adding a chef to a panel of pundits on a football show or something. We ‘shoehorn’ things in all the time.

Although, really, the shoehorn does belong between the flimsy heel and the foot, doesn’t it? So wedging it between them is uncomfortable (as the poor chef might be I suppose) but it could actually be the very thing that stops bruising on one side and protects the shoe from wear and tear on the other. Maybe sometimes a little apropos of nothing, a non sequitur, maybe even a straw-man in a debate could be a catalyst to getting things slipping into place and eventually doing up the laces.

Still old-fashioned a thing though, I think, the Shoehorn, the Mister Shoehorn. A bumbling shopkeeper perhaps, in a coal-blackened apron, a rotund man who bristles grey eyebrows at the tinkling of the door, and grimaces even more so at the thick London fog that rolls in from the grimy street.