Old shoes, new shoes

I once heard on a podcast the suggestion that we try everything when we are young but as we get older we stick to just the few things that we really like. That makes sense from a risk perspective, why try something you might not like when something you know you love is on offer?, and also from a time perspective, why dwell over other options you've found something you love? I've been there with shoes for a while. 

I buy all my shoes from Ecco (size 42) and have a mix of smart home shoes, everyday walking shoes and extreme weather walking shoes. 

It's the everyday walking shoes that take the most damage, remember I average something over 20km a day, and my current pair have just collapsed after ten months. So I've bought a replacement pair.

There is always a fair degree of guess work when buying shoes on line, e.g. you cannot get a feel for the materials used, and Ecco keep changing their designs in their extensive range. This was meant to be a like for like replacement and I am very happy with the result.

Two left feet

I have been wearing ecco shoes for several years and always have about five different pairs on the go at the same time, ranging from smart to outdoor trekkers. One of my casual walking pairs is nearing end of life so I went online to buy a new pair.

Taking advantage of a sale I went for a pair of ECCO MX M, a style I had worn and liked before.

This time I was a little bit adventurous and went for grey rather than black.

Ecco went even more adventurous and sent me two left shoes.

They're about to go back and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they have a proper pair left. 

Wearing the company colours

It is our work's Christmas Party today and I bought a new shirt for the occasion. I bought it several months ago.

It is, like most of the shirts that I have bought in recent years, from 1 like no other because they make exceedingly good shirts and I can now afford to buy them. Most are kept back for special occasions, like the BCSA Garden Party, but a few are in general use and get worn to work about once a month.

As soon as I saw the one I am wearing today I had to buy it because it is very like our company branding. This is the home page of our website.

About a year ago we refreshed our brand and part of that is an image of a network of dots and lines on a dark blue background.

This is the shirt I had to wear today.

As this is a company shirt it will now go into the work section of my wardrobe (just right of centre) and will make regular appearances in the office from now on. Normally 1 like no other shirts go into the best section of my wardrobe, higher even than my Liberty shirts, which is on the left and is separated from my common work shirts by my trousers.

On the fifteenth day of Christmas ...

It is perhaps more traditional in Britain to get your Christmas presents on Christmas day but one of mine had been put safely away a couple of months ago and could not be found on Christmas Eve which is when we dig out the presents we bought for each other from their hiding places and wrap them.

Like most of my presents I knew (or at least hoped) that this one was coming as I had dropped large hints earlier. Those large hints included a link to this specific shirt.

It is, of course, another shirt by 1 Like No Other which are becoming an increasingly large part of my collection simply because they look stunning and are very well tailored. I love the little features like those inside the collar and cuffs.

Despite being a classy shirt this one is destined to be worn to work. After many years of wearing a dark suit and a white shirt with a colourful tie it is nice to be wearing smart casual and to give the pretty shirts that I have always bought, mostly from Liberty, more outings.

It's my birthday later this month and I am already dropping similar large hints. I just hope that I do not have to wait fifteen days again.

My new best shirt is also by 1 Like No Other

I have a new best shirt and it is also by 1 Like No Other, my third. If this shirt was in a Lewis Carroll novel then it would have a prominent label on it demanding "Buy Me", which I did.

I cannot recall now how I stumbled across it, and there was nothing remotely pressing about my need for a new best shirt (I have about six Division 1 shirts), but once seen I had no option but to buy it. I did think about it for a couple of days, because of the cost, until simple arguments like "you cannot take it with you" and "you deserve it" won the day.

It got its first outing to the Rose Theatre and did its job magnificently. I wonder what John Malkovich made of it when he walked by.

If there was any doubt of the standing of 1 Like No Other then this was dispelled when I saw Peter Huf (yes, the Huf Haus guy) wearing one at a talk this week. I was only upset that I was not wearing one of mine, though I have not yet got to the stage where 1 Like No Other shirts have become normal day-wear, that's Division 3 and these shirts are Division 1.

Another 1 Like No Other shirt joins my collection

I got my first 1 Like No Other shirt as a Christmas present in 2013 and it immediately won me over to the brand thanks to both the pretty pattern and the quality of the construction. It also helped me to re-categorise my shirts with the creation of an upper division of shirts for special occasions only, the sort of shirt that gets worn once or twice a year.

The division below that has my newer Liberty shirts which I am still buying at the rate of one or two a year. As these get worn they drop a division where they can be worn to work.

Wearing flowery shirts to work at my new job gives me the excuse to buy more of them in all categories and so I treated myself to this one from 1 Like No Other. It is individually numbered and limited to 500 pieces, mine is number 18.

The special occasion it made its debut for was seeing the play No Man's Land. This would not normally be grand enough to justify a shirt as exceptional as this but I wanted to wear it once before it took its place alongside the other Division 1 shirts in my wardrobe.

Wearing it to the theatre in the evening also meant wearing it to work during the day where it got a suitable reception, the other exotic shirt wearer complimented it and everybody else accepted it as the sort of shirt that they are used to seeing me in.

I have a few more Liberty shirts (almost)

My collection of Liberty shirts has taken a big jump in the last few weeks thanks to their tie-in with Uniqlo. I heard about this via my regular Liberty email notices and made a trip to my local Uniqlo, in Kingston, a couple of days after the launch.

Downstairs in the women's section there were all sorts of garments in all sorts of colours but upstairs in the men's section there were only four blue long-sleeve shirts. I do not normally wear blue so I limited myself to just two of them.

I had a change of mind soon after and went online to buy the other two styles. They had none left in my size. Reasoning that the Kingston might have more stock than the online store I went in there to have a look but they had no shorts at all and there was no evidence in menswear that the Liberty line ever existed.

Relief came with another email announcing that the Summer range would be on sale at 11pm on Thursday 28 April and the preview showed that there would be more shorts, with short sleeves this time.

So I went on line at 11pm on Thursday 28 April and bought a few; four to be precise. Still mostly blue so I'll just have to get used to wearing blue.

I hope to be starting a new job in a couple of weeks and the dress code is smart casual (I believe!) and my plan is to have the Liberty/Uniqlo shirts as part of my uniform and to keep back my original Liberty shirts for special events, like weekends.

My new Liberty shirt, and bag

I like to make a note here of my significant purchases just to remind me later how old some of my things are, both out of curiosity and as justification for replacing them.

I have been wearing Liberty shirts for just over 25 years. I started buying them in some number then, usually around four at a time, because I was working in an office very close to Liberty in Great Marlborough Street and I had the income to do so. My office location changed and the kids came along and while my purchases slowed they never stopped.

Over that 25 years some of my favourite shirts have died. Some are in the garden clothes pile and other are in the sewing pile in the hope that parts of them can be reused. Others have gone completely. There are currently 14 Liberty shirts in my wardrobe varying in condition from suitable for a special occasion to only to be worn in a dark pub.

To keep this range going I need to keep feeding the top end and I like to buy at least one shirt a year.

And this delightful pink thing is my latest.

The spur to buy this one was an online offer that gave a free Flowers of Liberty tote bag with orders over £100. Liberty shirts have crept up to £130 and so I qualified comfortably.

I am very happy with both.

Having A Merry Leeds Rhinos Christmas

I dropped some massive hints on what I wanted for Christmas, the sort of hints that come in emails with URLs to shopping websites, and I am delighted that they worked.

After some years of neglect I am starting to rebuild my wardrobe by throwing out all the worn-out clothes and replacing them with new ones. The throwing out part is working well and I just need to pay a little more attention to the replacing part.

I like cotton rugby shirts because they more flexible than jumpers (you do not need to wear a shirt underneath) and they are prettier too. It also gives me the opportunity to show my loyalty to Wales (international Ruby Union), Leeds/Yorkshire Carnegie (domestic Rugby Union) and Leeds Rhinos (Rugby League).

I already had two Leeds Rhinos shirts and at Christmas I got two more.

Rugby League is now a Summer game and the new Super League season does not start until February (that's early Summer!) but the new 2015 strip was in the shops for Christmas. These are, left-to-right, the new away and home shirts.

The home short is a slight variant on the usual blue and yellow but my other two away shirts are white and pink so the new one adds some fresh colours to my wardrobe. I am wearing the away shirt now.

A new shirt for a new season

The new Rugby League season is upon us and Leeds Rhinos have a very different away strip this year. I last bought one two years ago and that was very bright with its pink and blue hoops. Last year's away shirt was much the same, possibly even pinker.

This year they have gone for white, which I love, not least because that is the home colour of Leeds United (Leeds Rhinos wear blue and yellow at home). It is also a colour that is easier to match with other things.

It is a short-sleeved shirt, as was the last one, so I think that I'll keep wearing the other rugby shirts that I have, Leeds Carnegie and Wales, for a while.

It should be warm enough to wear it on Saturday 16 August when the Rhinos are due to play the London Broncos at their new ground, The Hive in Edgware.

I have a ShiteShirt

How could I have forgotten to write about this superb shirt?

I did a tweetpic of it at the time and I assumed that I had done a blog post too but it was only when writing about my Christmas 2013 shirt from 1 Like No Other that I realised that this one was still a secret.

This was clearly an oversight as it is my duty to write about my most flowery and most outrageous shirts, and they do not come much more flowery or outrageous as this one.

It's a ShiteShirt and they are unique. Each one is made from lots of different pieces of colourful fabric that come together to make something deliberately eye-catching.

I found out about them on New Year's Eve 2012/13 when I saw somebody wearing one in the Wych Elm, asked him where he got it and immediately added it to my birthday list and less than a month later I had one myself.

It has had a few outings since then and has always attracted admiring comments, at least I like to think of them as admiring.

The only other one that I have seen in the wild since I got mine was, sadly, on Eastenders which I only caught because I was making sure that I did not miss the start of Sherlock which followed it. This rarity helps to add to the shirt's shock value and I'll continue to wear mine with mischievous delight.

My new flowery shirt

Nothing quite says Christmas like a new flowery shirt.

In previous years these have come from Liberty and have been bought by me for me in the sales after the actual day but still within the holiday period. This year was a little different.

The shirt was bought for me by my wife in time for Christmas Day but so late on Christmas Eve that the sales had already started.

And it is not from Liberty, it is by 1 Like No Other.

It is, as you can see, gloriously flowery. It is also tailored (it comes in a bit in the middle) and has a nice contrasting finish on the collar and cuffs. It is a very nice shirt and has already had several outings to theatres etc.

My once plentiful supply of Liberty shirts is looking very old and warn in places and I do need to replace several of them so I could be paying another visit to 1 Like No Other sometime, though at a normal price of £130 or more it will have to be in the sales. I like flowery shirts but not as much as that.

New shirts from Leeds and Wales

A recent splurge in spending has provided me with a few more shirts to wear and the chance to demonstrate some of my sporting loyalties.

I like traditional cotton rugby shirts  but the Liberty ones I bought twenty years ago are dead or dying.

The first new addition is a Leeds Carnegie (Rugby Union) home shirt.

I normally buy away shirts on the grounds that I no longer live in Leeds but that is only available with short sleeves so I went for the home shirt instead.

The away shirt, which is mostly white like the magnificent Leeds United, is still on my wish list and may appear here once Spring comes.

This shirt should get its first official outing at London Welsh v Leeds Carnegie in Richmond on 25 February.

I already own a Welsh rugby shirt but a recent display of patriotism at Welsh Water in Cardiff, where everybody (and I mean everybody) wore a rugby shirt to work ahead of a World Cup game, showed just how old mine is.

It is so old that it does not even have a sponsor's name on it. I like it a lot though and am wearing it now as this is a Six Nations weekend.

The new shirt is much flashier that the old simply-red one with its tailored cut and white features.

It is also made of modern materials (i.e. some sort of plastic) so it is not as warm as the others which should make it a Spring/Autumn shirt but Wales are playing Ireland tomorrow so I'll give it a go. Who cares about a cold snap?

Oddly, I will also be wearing this shirt on 25 February as England are playing Wales at Twickenham after the Leeds Carnegie game.

The first game I'll see at the ground and the second in a pub in Richmond. In both cases I'll be wearing the away shirt so it could be fun!

The final shirt is the best.

I am a fan of Leeds Rhinos (Rugby League) and have wanted a shirt for some time but the blue and yellow colours of the home shirt do not suite me.

So I've bought the new away shirt instead.

This comes in three variants, authentic (i.e what the players wear), replica (like the authentic but not as tight fitting) and cotton.

I've gone for the cotton one for the comfort and warmth.

It will get worn before then but it's official debut should be at London Harlequins v Leeds Rhinos on 30 June.

All three shirts are very welcome additions to my wardrobe and make something of a change from the usual rock band black t-shirts.

New suits

I have three classes of suit; a best for special events like weddings, a couple of good business suits for sales calls and demanding clients and a couple of cheap business suits for everyday wear when the client environment does not demand any more.

I rarely suffer the drop down to smart casual at work and find it a real pain when I have to do so. Suits are just so much easier. I mostly wear white shirts and the only semi-decision to make is the tie to go with it and I have a rough schedule that cycles through my Liberty ties.

My two lower end suits both got binned at the end of my last project so it was back to Next to get some more. I usually buy these suits from Next as they are just a little bit more modern than, say M&S, without being overly so. They also fit me in just the same way that Jaegar suits never do.

The colour is easy too. Black.

Black suits me, again in a way that Navy and Grey do not, and it also allows me to wear ties with any colour that I like. As I do.

While the choosing is easy the shopping is less so. I used to work in the City and there the branches of Next carry a large stock of suits but out in the sticks, e.g. Kingston upon Thames, the range is limited and the stock more so.

The half hour or so that I spent in the shop and the hour or more getting there and back was a complete waste of time.

So I did what I should have done in the first place and headed for the internet instead. Their the Next website showed me their range of suits, allowed me to pick exactly the sizes I wanted and promised next day delivery. And next day it was.

I do like it when simple things like buying a new black suit turn out to be simple after all.

Liberty shirts are always in fashion

Liberty remains my favourite shop on the planet.

I wear a Liberty tie to work every day and a bow tie to the opera, sometimes with a matching handkerchief in the jacket pocket. I used to wear those to work too but fashions change.

I have a fond collection of casual shirts for the weekends that get reluctantly relegated to wear-when-gardening pile when too worn for public consumption.

I was in heaven when I worked just 100m away but times move on and I have fewer opportunities to get there these days; but it's still fun when I do.

I had one of those opportunities recently and it was good to see lots of Liberty fabric shirts as in some periods they have been rather thin on the ground. Sadly they now cost £150 so I'll need a pretty good excuse to buy some more.

In the meantime I can look admiringly at them and dream.

Dead shoes

I've work proper brogues to work for years, it's part of my "serious consultant" brand. Usually these are the Full Monty with leather soles and are purchased from Jones Bootmaker for something around, or in excess of, £100.

I find the close hard fit of a brogue very comfortable and you get a buzz of confidence knowing that you are wearing good shoes. They tend to wear well too, which is just as well as I like to include some walking in my daily commute.

The only down-side is the leather soles which can turn in to blotting paper when the ground is very wet and the impact of my walking is much the same as leaving the shoes in a full bath for twenty minutes.

And do, reluctantly, I have been known to but some cheaper imitation brogues, the sort of shoe that is designed more for soft comfort than appearance. I get these from Clarks because I remember the days when shoes meant Clarks (in the same way that Beanz Meanz Heinz) and also there are family connections with several of the Bridgwater clan having worked for Clarks in Street at some point. Some may still do so.

So it was a mixture of surprise, astonishment and disappointment when my new pair of Clarks shoes collapsed on me after just a few months.

The astonishment comes from the way that they died. The soles show just minimal signs of wear but both heels collapsed spectacularly, something I only expected to happen with ladies' shoes.

This left me with the embarrassment of walking around the office with the heels flapping around like a stupid dog's tongue.

I've learnt my lesson and am back on the proper brogues. I have three pairs so that wet ones have time to dry and the seriously ill ones have time to be mended. As is often the case, going for the cheaper option proved to be a false economy.

Note: All of the comments below are spam. I have posted them out of amusement.

My new Cyberoptix bow tie is uniquely cool

I used to buy shed-loads of Liberty ties before they became too expensive even in the sales and I used to wear bow ties to work regularly too, but it has been quite a while since I've done either. That changed this week thanks to Warren Ellis.

His blog post pointed me to the Cyberoptix site where after some drooling I settled on the Crash tie. There were other contenders but the tiebreaker (sic) was the reference to JG Ballard's novel of the same name.

The tie has been ordered and is now being made for me. All being well it will arrive in time to make its début at Glyndebourne at the end of this month.

New glasses

One of the reasons that I keep this blog is to record momentous events in my life that I may well want to refer back to in the future. Such as getting new glasses.

This may seem trivial but opticians, like dentists and other shunned professionals, are always asking me "when did you last ..." questions and I never know the answer. But now I can look it up.

I've been running this blog for about 3 1/2 years so I guess that my glasses were a little older than that and were due for replacement as my eyes will have changed a little over that period. They were also so scratched it was like walking through fog all the time.

And I'd broken them too.

A new pair of glasses in the house prompted me to dig out all the old cases and old broken pairs that I had kept just in case.

My new glasses are at the front and happen to be by Jaegar but the selection process had nothing to do with the brand. I like them and they fit. End of.

In the middle are my previous pair, by Prada, and behind them is another broken pair of uncertain pedigree.

In the front-right are the oldest pair which I am keeping because they are not broken. They were a spare pair I got for free many years ago with the intention of using them for driving, hence the large lenses. They are not fit to be worn in public!

Glass cases are more durable than the glasses themselves so I have some surviving for glasses that I no longer recall. I also bought a couple of other ones from Muji and Liberty, those were brand purchases.

The arrival of the new glasses is duly logged and I can now bring order to this aspect of my life and the broken glasses and unnecessary cases are destined for the bin. Might just keep the Prada case though.

On a winning streak :-)

I do not enter that many competitions but some tempt me and it is nice when I win something and just recently things have been going my way a little.

1. I'm hardly short of shoulder bags but I fancied The Day the Earth Stood Still one in a competition in 2000AD and now it is in the study with all the others. Got the DVD too.
2. The Willoughby Pub Kwiz on Sunday nights is a low-key affair but it is still nice to win and my team did a week ago and we got a Da Vinci Code board game each as our token prize.
   
3. This week I won £25 on the Premium Bonds. I would have preferred the million but given today's saving rates £25 is a good return!
4. I'm not short of black t-shirts either but who could resist a Philosophy Football one?

The total value of all these prizes is under £50 (and it's only that high because of the Premium Bond win) but it's nice to win and nicer to have something to show for it. Shame about the holiday to Mexico though ...

The shirt event. I'll repeat that…the shirt event*

When it first opened, Liberty was described by Oscar Wilde, a friend of founder Arthur Liberty, as “the chosen resort of the artistic shopper”.

I agree.

My sadly limited collection of Liberty shirts is not getting any younger and some of them are seriously showing signs of years of wear and adoration.

The worn ones get relegated to very casual wear, then to gardening wear and only when devoid of any colour are they reluctantly put in the fabric recycling bank.

So it was time to make another pilgrimage to Liberty, fortuitously coincident with their Winter Sale.

Liberty menswear department has been ringing the changes in recent years as it has moved out of the Regent Street section and moved away from its Gentleman's Outfitters appearance (which I loved) and has adopted the standard modern shop look with lots of space and not many clothes.

Sadly there has also been a move away from the beautiful swathes of traditional Liberty fabric that used to adorn shirts, ties, pyjamas, underwear, and almost every other form of male clothing.

I have never gone as far as underwear but I do have loads of ties, a rugby shirt (the other one died), some polo shirts and more handkerchiefs than any man has a right to own.

I went to Liberty hoping to find three new shirts but not really expecting to be able to do so.

But Liberty came up trumps and I left joyously with three gorgeous new shirts that shout "Liberty" at you from 50m. That's what I call a successful shopping trip.

*No clues where the title comes from, you really should know.