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History of a Clodhopper

I am a shoe.

To be more precise, I am a man's shoe, tan of colour, eight-and-half of size and tailored to fit a right foot. I have a partner, the mirror image of myself, but where he is I cannot tell. I know, though, that he has been reduced to the same sorry state as that in which I now reside. For of all things in the world, who has use for a single, worn-out and utterly derelict shoe?

I began life as part of the covering of a large, patently ridiculous creature that nonetheless served mankind with patience and forbearing, faithfully providing him with more than a gallon of milk morning and evening for well-nigh eighteen years. In time, she succumbed to the inexorable advance of age and was no longer able to fill her daily quota. So, in a touching display of gratitude for countless gallons of tea and coffee rendered drinkable, ten thousand plates of porridge and breakfast cereal rendered enjoyable and who knows how many scoops of ice cream, helpings of custard and babies' meals, she was dispatched to the local abattoir. There, after one final bellow of outrage, she was transformed into so many cans of pets' food - and my life as an independent entity began.

The cow's hide was stripped from her carcass and sent to a tannery. There it was steeped for several weeks in a foul-smelling broth of hot water and wattle-bark extract. The tanning process complete, the covering of hair was scraped away and the hide hung up to dry - except that it was no longer appropriate for it to be referred to it as "hide." The cow's erstwhile outer covering had undergone subtle metamorphosis: it had thickened, changed colour and, as it dried, had assumed a wonderful pliancy and an aroma suggestive of expensive upholstery, fashionable clothing - and footwear. It had been transformed into leather.

The side of leather of which I was still a part was sold to a shoe factory where, after much cutting, shaping and stitching, I had taken shape and had been mounted on a base formed from some synthetic substance: my sole. Finally, I was equipped with a length of finely woven cotton which, laced through my double bank of sightless eyes, would ensure that I would remain firmly attached to the right foot of whomever might deem me worthy of purchase. I, latterly an unknown and unsung tract of cowhide, had become an article which, as much as any Stetson, tweed or tuxedo, serves as a badge to distinguish civilized man from the savage. I was a shoe.

I was now introduced to my partner

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