I think I now know why Douglas Adams placed so much importance Shoes. Ever since I can remember my respectable shoes have been supplied by Church's. They may be expensive (the last set were over £400) but they last for a decade or more, under rough wear, so to pay less is a false economy. Every year you send them off to the factory and they are resoled on the original last. For the first time in thirty years they came back this summer with poor stitching. I sent them back, and got them a week later without any work having been done. Frustrating, but I sent them back again on Saturday (grumbling). That meant the backup pair had to be packed for Hong Kong (where I have to wear a suit for three days). I noticed that a lace was missing (16 year old son main suspect) but determined to buy a new set in Heathrow. That was when the trouble began.
The shoe shops in Heathrow told me that they were now banned form selling shoe laces in security grounds. I must admit that the prospect of a shoe lace being a deadly weapon was a new one on me. They generally break easily and are not long enough to get around the average neck. I could do far more damage with a power-cord, freely available at many stores. However assuming the unlikely idea shoe laces providing a new weapon in the terrorists armory, why then do shoe shops in Heathrow sell shoes with laces in them? If the laces are as deadly as seems to be implied then surely we should only be allowed to buy shoes with elastic sides or velcro fastening? Its rather like the US screening people who buy one way tickets on the basis that they may be planing to blow themselves up on the outwards journey and don't want to waste money on the return portion of the fare. Buying a set of shoes to obtain the laces is not a major burden to overcome.
It got worse in Hong Kong. I went out to buy a set of black laces. In an hour and a half I visited multiple shoe shops to be told that that shoe laces were unavailable. I was treated with contempt in one location for not realising that I should buy new shoes when the laces break ....
Finally someone took pity on me and gave me a set designed for trainers with large metal ends. Half an hour with an improvised screwdriver (my portable stabler) saw the metal ends off the laces and I just about managed to thread them. They will not look good, or balanced, but at least my shoes will not fall off.
Between stupidity in security and a culture which sees lace breakage as justifying a new purchase of shoes. Evolving to be birds is the next step (read Adams if you don't get that)
Comments (4)
The rules on what you can & can't buy is always amusing. What tickles me is that they won't let you have metal cutlery, cutlery that was, in any case, more like child's cutlery than anything that could cut anything.
However, to accompany your plastic cutlery, you can still buy a glass bottle of whatever...
Posted by Emma | March 25, 2008 8:20 PM
Posted on March 25, 2008 20:20
Sorry to hear of your saga, but I had to laugh as the insanity and always constant human stupidity reminded me of Stephen Wright one-liners.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/steven_wright.html
Posted by Josh | March 25, 2008 8:52 PM
Posted on March 25, 2008 20:52
A glorious vignette of 21st century life with all its wonderful contradictions! :-)
It reminded of the shoe lace theme in 'The Mezzanine' by Nicholson Baker: a small extract of which is below:
-------
... In the course of preparing the present record of that Aurelius-and-shoelace noon, I lived through a rigorous month in which the subject of shoelace-tying and shoelace wear came up 325 times, whereas Aurelius's sentiment cycled around only 90 times. I doubt very much that I will ever concentrate on either of them again, having worn both of the thoughts out for myself. But these sudden later flurries may not count, since they are artificial duplicative retrievals performed in order to understand how the earlier natural retrievals had come about. The very last instance of shoelace thought happened as follows: by chance, I was flipping through the 1984-1986 Research Reports of MIT's Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity at my office, and I noticed . . . the subject of the "pathology of worn ropes" . . .
And then [later at the library], checking the 1984 volumes of World Textile Abstracts, I read entry 5422:
Methods for evaluating the abrasion resistance and knot slippage strength of shoe laces
Z. Czaplicki
Technik Wlokienniczy, 1984, 33 No. 1, 3-4 (2 pages). In Polish.
Two mechanical devices for testing the abrasion resistance and knot slippage performance of shoe laces are described and investigated. Polish standards are discussed. [C] 1984/4522
I let out a small cry and slapped my hand down on the page. The joy I felt may be difficult for some to understand. Here was a man, Z. Czaplicki, who had to know! He was not going to abandon the problem with some sigh about complexity and human limitation after a minute's thought, as I had, and go to lunch — he was going to make the problem his life's work. Don't tell me he received a centralized directive to look into a more durable weave or shoelace for the export market. Oh no! His very own shoelace had snapped one time too many one morning, and instead of buying a pair of replacement dress laces at the corner farmacja and forgetting about the problem until the next time, he had constructed a machine and strapped hundreds of shoelaces of all kinds into it, wearing them down over and over, in a passionate effort to get some subtler idea of the forces at work. And he had gone beyond that — he had built another machine to determine which surface texture of shoelace would best hold its knot, so that humanity would not have to keep retying its shoelaces all day long and wearing them out before their time. A great man! I left the library relieved. Progress was being made. Someone was looking into the problem. Mr. Czaplicki, in Poland, would take it from there
Posted by David Cronshaw | March 26, 2008 9:41 AM
Posted on March 26, 2008 09:41
Thanks for a good laugh, although sorry that you had to be so discomfited to provide it!
Throwing away the shoes when the laces break - what a society we live in!
On the subject of what you can and can't buy in the airport - have you ever noticed how, once you have passed through the security check and been relieved of all your potentially dangerous objects, you can buy replacements for most of them in the duty free shopping area. You might not be able to buy laces, but you can buy shoes which have laces. You can, as Emma points out, buy liquids in glass bottles. You can buy all sorts of toiletries. I have even (on one occasion) seen a selection of penknives!
Posted by Karyn Romeis | March 26, 2008 9:47 AM
Posted on March 26, 2008 09:47