The Greeks Italians have a word for it

This week, in my Italian class, we got round to expanding our vocabulary a bit by looking at various articles of clothing. In contrast to my experiences as a schoolboy linguist, I was gratified to find that things have moved on quite considerably, and thus I learned that skinny jeans are "jeans adorenti". But what of stiletto heels, I wondered - after all, stiletto is an Italian word, is it not?

"i tacchi a punta" we were told is apparently the correct way of expressing it, coupled with the height of the heel in centimetres. So.. given that I absolutely love wearing 5" stiletto-heeled knee-boots... I reckon I'm going to have quite a bit of fun doing this weeek's homework!

Just lie back and enjoy it!

I don't go in much for posting video clips on here, but this one I thought deserved a mention: it's a guy enjoying a very hot pair of white patent balletboots. With a running time of just over twenty minutes, though, it's main appeal is to the serious afficionado.

I must confess to being very intrigued by the idea of wearing balletboots. As you'll see, not many guys you come across on video can actually walk in them, and most in fact can hardly stand. But as a hot bedroom item, on the other hand..... Anyway, I don't want to give too much of the 'plot' away:

Fan club?

I was exchanging emails with a guy at the end of last week, who's into thighboots. As I've written on here before I've got a bit of a thing about boots, including high-heel ones. So we had quite a friendly chat about it and the upshot was that I decided to take some pics of me wearing mine and upload them: they're knee-high rubber stilettos! It's something I'd had half in mind to do for a while in fact. So I set up a little mini photo-shoot with the boots, some black wet-look leggings and a corset to complete the ensemble.

It was a terrific fun way to spend a wet breezy Saturday afternoon and I thoroughly enjoyed doing it. I have no pretentions whatever to being photogenic, although the focus was on the boots and not on me. Nevertheless I was gobsmacked to see that my Flickr stats have since absolutely shot up seven-fold on the strength of it!! The obvious inference is I am not by a long chalk the only guy who's into stilettos - it is moderately obvious that it's a guy who's wearing them. If only I could master the art of walking in them as easily?

PS - I've kept the corset on: I really must get properly back into the habit of that.

White Christmas?

After a bout of bitterly cold weather including an inch or two of snow last weekend, the prospect of a white Christmas now seems unlikely (if you judge that as getting fresh snow on Christmas Day, that is). Compared to some people we've had it relatively easy here: deliveries have still been getting through and I did all the Christmas shopping easily enough without feeling the need to stockpile bread or milk. I remember that although they didn't bulk-buy as such, my parents always used to keep a stash of tinned food in the house as well as things like toilet rolls. In the days before freezers were a common item of domestic equipment, it was a sensible precaution I suppose to make sure that if we got snowed in, we wouldn't starve!

Raggs as usual has been delighted with the blanket of snow to snuffle around in: it's been slow to melt off the garden and it's fast turning to ice instead, making it decidedly slippery underfoot. For the second winter in a row she's getting quite used to it, in contrast to all those people who seem reluctant to adapt to the reality that if it's likely to snow, then a certain degree of preparedness might be in order! All the same, while I can just wrap up warm with my knee-high winter boots, I can afford a certain element of smugness by virtue of the fact I don't have to trudge off to work in it any longer. If I did, then I'd no doubt be moaning about it like all the other hapless commuters.


Enough of that. With my little tree on the window sill, and a plate of sausage rolls to nibble at, I'm all ready for the "big day". Coincidentally, this is my 100th blog post, although it wasn't my deliberate intention to mark the occasion, as it were. Anyway.... Happy Christmas!

Autumn equinox

I'm a few days late with this, as the autumn equinox was actually 23rd September, but anyway it seems to me that we're well and truly into autumn now - cold nights, chilly mornings and a definite nip in the air in the evening too, even after a tolerably fine day. Time to turn the heating on, if only for a couple of hours - and time to get the plants in off the balcony to the relative warmth of the windowsill.

Time, too, to dig some winter clothes out ready: this morning my New Rock boots came in very handy as I took Raggs for our customary Sunday walk in the woods!

The scattergun effect!

One of the most annoying things about searching on the internet is the way a search for a specific subject or topic will produce a ton of unrelated material which, because of the way it's indexed, takes the right constituent pieces but puts them together in the wrong order.

To give an example, I usually check out which of my Flickr photos have been viewed the most, and how people found them. It's not much more than idle curiosity on my part, but it's a bit of an indication of the sort of stuff that it's probably not worth bothering to upload. Most searching seems to give fairly predictable results, but the one that caught my eye yesterday was "hairy beach stud" - and this is what they found:

It's an old polaroid holiday snap from the 1980s, and the caption reads: "On the beach with Sweep (the dog)- Me in tight jeans and DM boots with our first dog - a nice hairy one named Sweep. I was the envy of all the local lads in those boots: the 14-hole ones had only just come out and they all wanted to know where I'd got them from."

So the "beach" came from the title, the "hairy" from the subtitle, and the "stud" from the 'studded' tag I used to label the studded leather belt I was wearing. But rather obviously (or so I think, anyway) neither of us really fits the description of a hairy beach stud!

Ah well.... life is full of its little disappointments for someone.

Mantyhose

One tip I picked up when I was a regular bike rider was wearing leggings or tights underneath your jeans kept your legs nice and warm in the winter! So I did. I must admit I kinda liked the feel of it, too.

Fast forward some years, and I read that it's now apparently fashionable (in some circles at least) for guys to wear tights - as indeed they used to centuries ago - coining the word "mantyhose". While I'm not really bold enough to do it in public, I do rather like the look and feel of tights with shorts, especially as the weather has turned noticeably cooler this week. I'm not entirely sure I have the legs for it, and I suspect I probably ought to shave them, though my legs aren't particularly hairy anyway. Whatever - I always get a kick out of being unconventional!

Working on the land

There's been quite an unseasonable chill in the air this week, especially during the evening and at night - not much like May at all. However, for the most part the daytime has been reasonably dry and pleasant, so I've been out in the garden quite a bit making the most of it. Tuesday I donned my old 14-hole Doc Martens and did some weeding and tidying amongst the tomato plants. They're still only seedlings, and unless we get some warmer weather pretty soon - which they need to put on a spurt of growth - I have doubts as to whether they're going to amount to much.

In contrast, the raspberries, which I worked on today, are doing much better with some good strong canes and masses of small flower buds already. In my 10-hole DM boots and my 3/4 Reebok trackies, I hacked away at the weeds and filled the wheelbarrow with all the assorted unwanted foliage. I didn't bother last year and the raspberries went on to produce their best-ever crop, so although it looks better tidy it may not actually have mattered that much. It didn't take all that long, anyway and was quite good exercise I suspect: I've lost about half a stone in the last three weeks or so! Yippee!

Beside the seaside

I spent a happy hour or two last night going through an old photo album, scanning in some polaroid photos of me on holiday in the 1980s. A friend from work had a caravan at Warren Bay on the North Somerset coast just up the road from Watchet, and it was great to spend a week or so down there walking along the beach with the dog running in and out of the sea chasing the gulls ineffectually. I don't think dogs are allowed on public beaches anymore now which is a bit of a shame: she really enjoyed it.

Throwing caution to the winds (which is what people traditionally do on holiday!) I used to wear skintight jeans, studded leather belt and armbands, and 14-hole black Doc Marten boots! The big boots had only just come out as I remember in the early 1980s, and the first year a couple of lads came up to me and rather cautiously asked where I'd got them... I think they were afraid I was going to kick them off the habour wall with them. In 1983 when Wham! shot to fame with "Bad Boys" I looked the part with a Wham! T-Shirt to go with the rest of the outfit.

We used to go in early June, and most years in fact the weather was gorgeous for at least part of the time: I loved stripping the waist to take full advantage. The shot of me in my skimpy cut-off denim shorts and DMs epitomises a somewhat devil-may-care attitude, I have to say... but it was fun, and that's what holidays are all about.

Me in high heels

I guess it's probably not unrelated to my love of wearing a corset, but from time to time I've gone in for wearing high heels. I'm neither proficient enough nor brave enough to do it in public but I nonetheless love the feeling and sensation of walking around in high-heeled boots. Whether I have the legs for it is something else again! A significant downside is actually getting hold of a pair that fit me: I variously take a size 8 or 9 in "normal" shoes/boots depending on the style, which translates into a 10 where stilettos are involved, and that's not always a guarantee of a good fit. I have found that a 10 can be a bit tight whereas an 11 will give better room initially but will tend to let my feet slip forward too much when I start walking in them.

Somewhat on impulse (because they were half-price in a sale) I bought a pair of Pleaser 1002 black rubber ankle boots. They arrived yesterday and seemed a pretty good fit when I tried them on: I've been wearing them most of the morning - just in the house! - and somewhat to my surprise they're really comfortable and feel great on. The 5" heels are a bit of a killer, as walking naturally in heels that high isn't something I've practised enough to carry off with expertise, but I reckon with a bit of perseverence it should come a bit more naturally.

More mud

It had rained heavily during the night (and had turned quite a bit colder, too), so wellies were once again the order of the day as I took Raggs walking in the woods this morning. I brought my digital camera along, as I was hoping to get some pics of her lying flat out in the mud like a hippo wallowing, but she decided she didn't want to co-operate and spent most of the time snuffling round in the grass - and apparently eating copious chunks of it.

So I took some pics of me, instead. I didn't lie flat out in it, but in places I did sink up to my ankles in it, hearing the now-familiar slurpy squelching sound as I pulled my boots free. Perhaps understandably there weren't quite as many other people out walking their dogs there this week. I daresay playing in the mud isn't everyone's idea of fun, though I must say I enjoyed it today just as much as I used to when I was a boy. Maybe seven-year olds don't go in for such simple pleasures as sploshing around in their wellies any more these days - probably not?

Dodging the showers

After a prolonged dry spell since Easter, the weather has turned much more like the normal seasonal British Bank Holiday weekend - wet with the promise of more to come! At least it was pleasantly warm this morning in a spot of brief sunshine, so I took the opportunity to mow the lawn. I'd in fact already begun to wish I'd done it sooner while the grass was still dry, but fortunately it hadn't grown too long and slippery, so wearing my trusty wellies I soon got it licked into shape with the mower, and snipped the long straggly bits down the side with the shears. Sorted!

Curiouser and curiouser

When I was going through all my old school and family photos and scanning them in, I uploaded all the images onto my Flickr photostream. I hadn't used it up until that point, and to be honest I wasn't sure how interesting they'd be to anyone else: apart from the Leamington College ones which any fellow ex-pupils would probably like to see, the remainder weren't much more than holiday snaps. Nevertheless, it looks from the statistics as if maybe other people have liked looking at my snapshots of Hong Kong in the late 1950s, which some people will undoubtedly remember.

I've taken some assorted photos of this and that when I've been writing entries on this blog, just to add a bit of colour and illustrate what I've been doing - so I thought I might as well upload those as well. I wasn't expecting them to arouse a great deal of interest: they're hardly unique and in one or two cases the technical quality isn't very good either. So it was to my great surprise that I found when looking at the stats for my photos that the new set of 18 images have clocked up over 220 views in the space of twenty-four hours to make it the second-highest number of views in a single day for my stuff, and by far the most popular are three of me in my muddy wellies on Easter Day. Huh? Go figure. Not that I'm complaining: it just seems an odd choice and not the one I'd have predicted. Anyway, here's the pic everyone seems to have latched onto as their favourite....

Pond life

It hasn't rained at all to the best of my recollection this week, so I abandoned my wellies in favour of my old blue Converse boots when I took Raggs for our morning walk in the woods this week. All went well until we cut through from the wooded path into an open grassy stretch - which was still waterlogged! Admittedly nowhere near as deep as last week, but enough to seep through the vent holes at the base of my boots and I ended up with damp socks. Yuk!

The other side of the path which bisects the area, we go past a small pond. She used to like to dive in, and during the summer when the water was low and the sun was hot, she'd wallow in the shallows looking just like a little hippo. To our surprise today, there were a couple of ducks swimming there. I don't know where they've come from: two or three years ago a volunteer conservation group cleaned out the pond, removing the shopping trolleys and other items of junk and debris that mindless vandals always seem to delight in leaving behind them wherever they go. Maybe it was they who sponsored the ducks? However I decided they wouldn't appreciate their morning swim being interrupted by a hairy hippo wannabe, and we moved on.

We made our way over and sat on the little bench for a rest as usual, just as this picture shows - it was taken about six years ago, I guess, when we were both a little younger and a little more hairy. The bench looks much the same, though!

The things boys do

It was another fine spring-like day today, and since it's still in the Easter school holidays I could hear some of the kids playing in the street outside. The next door neighbours must have had their grandson round, because I could hear the clippity-clop sound he always makes, walking up and down their garden path wearing his mother's high-heeled shoes, which as he's only about five are miles too big for him. I've seen videos of other kids doing just the same: it's obviously something small boys like to do, and I daresay I may have done the same at his age, although if I did I honestly don't remember it.

On the other hand, I do remember one boiling hot summer's day when I was eight going on nine, putting on my father's big hobnailed army boots and sitting around in my bedroom in them: I must have been absolutely roasted! My mother came in, took a horrified look and told me to take them off, thinking I'd gone mad. I escaped getting punished for it, and I never did find out whether she told my father what I'd done.

When I was eleven I went one better! On the top floor of the rambling old house we lived in there was a boxroom in which I discovered one day two pairs of my father's old army motorcycle boots. I put on the black ones which were a size 7, so they weren't that much too big for me, and I loved the way the thick leather came all the way up my legs to my knees. I had a playroom in the room just next door, and I used to wear these boots undisturbed for many a happy hour up there - undiscovered but with the thrill of doing something naughty. I don't know what happened to them, but one day when I went to look, they weren't there anymore. I guess my father must've had a clear-out or something.


That put paid to my boot wearing activities for a while. We weren't allowed to wear boots to school, so I knew my mother wouldn't buy me any of my own, and I could hardly ask her given the reason I wanted them! So I had to wait until I'd grown up, had my own money and could buy what I wanted with it. In fact, by one of odd those quirks of fate, I got a motorbike in 1979 and thus got a pair of motorcycle boots of my very own after all. Not only that, for most of my adult life, I've worn boots of one sort or another: even now I tend to wear them in preference to shoes most of the time.

I can certainly trace it all back to that hot day as a boy when I tried my father's on, but I can't help feeling there may be something even further back, earlier in my childhood, buried deep in my subconscious, for boots to have held such an attraction and fascination for me all these years.

Mud-bath!

It had rained most of yesterday evening, and I could hear it beating against the window-pane well into the night, so I guessed that walking in the woods this morning, it was going to be extremely wet underfoot. I was right! I'd put my wellies on - smooth black shiny ones just like those I'd had as a kid when we lived in the village and I'd gone out to play wearing them, risking the wrath of my mother (who was fastidiously clean and neat), when I came back all mucky.

But today she wasn't around to complain, so I sploshed happily through the mud just as I loved doing when I about seven. In places it was quite deep and I could feel the suction gripping my boots as I pulled to extricate myself, and I heard the satisfying sluuurp sound. A bit further on there was surface water deep enough to wash it off, but only temporarily as I walked on a bit further still and started all over again. I guess I'll forever be a bit of a kid at heart, but it was a lovely fun way to spend Easter morning. I always find there's something innately satisfying about re-creating treasured childhood memories and experiences - especially those of things I wasn't really allowed to do at the time!

Fluffy puppy

We had Julie the canine beautician round again on Tuesday afternoon to give our Raggs a bit of a going-over! Although she emerged some two hours later very neatly groomed and sweet-smelling, Julie had trimmed a lot off the fur in front of her eyes, which I wasn't altogether too pleased about, because I get the impression it bothers her a bit having her eyes exposed to a lot of the bright daylight: ever since we got her she'd always been long and shaggy with a "curtain" in front hiding her eyes and she seemed to prefer it that way. I daresay she'll soon grow it back again. I then took her out for a walk in the evening and it rained steadily for most of time we were out, which somewhat ruined the effect!

We went to the woods this morning for our customary Sunday morning forage round: over the eighteen months since I left work it's become quite a regular feature of the week, and being a bright dog who doesn't miss a trick, she's developed a nice line in sitting there wittering impatiently if she thinks I'm taking longer than I need to in getting ready. It had rained on Wednesday evening too, so it was decidedly muddy underfoot and since I'd rather foolishly put on my old blue Converse boots which I use for just knocking around in, but which aren't really waterproof, I began to regret it. The forecast for the next couple of days is heavy rain so next week I suspect my wellies will be called for!