Designing a Shoe

the leather, the rose, the raspberry

I had designed a shoe. A very elegant little loafer. Fashioned from leather, soft to touch, leather that only improved with every nick, scuffed into a perfect battered shape. Because of this shoe i had been invited to meet someone in a house in the hills beyond Siena, Italy. The house was the colour of custard, its shutters painted racing green, jasmine worming its way up walls and around peeling corners. It was hot and I was taken through to a courtyard by way of the house, on the way passing a chair made of wood that wound around and around itself, guarded by a broom.

The courtyard had some shade, a blistered green metal table, an old bench that had supported lifetimes of long, lazy lunches and, dotted on the other side, some foldable metal chairs. All around grew, judging by their height, ancient roses. They were in full bloom, the petals sheets of rich blood. I went to smell one and lo, this was not a plant I had ever encountered. It was a curious hybrid, a marriage of fruit and flower, for inside those petals there was a bulb, a bulb that was in fact a huge, plump raspberry.

A lady emerged. She looked grounded but a little courtly too. A bit like Miuccia Prada with a navy, woven, broad hat crowning an outfit of white shirt and linen apron. She was the lady I was to meet to discuss the shoes with. She pointed out that the roses that grew at the edges of the yard had been blown by the wind into the warm yellow walls and the resulting red mess of ripe raspberry mulched into the wall looked like…

My phone vibrating woke me up. I’d slept through an alarm and the artist liaison was wondering why I wasn’t in the cab. There were twenty four minutes before my set started. The previous day I had been up for twenty four hours and my body was clearly trying to catch up. Five minutes later the snow was falling around me in the middle of The Hague as I looked for another car that was waiting a couple of streets away.

Entering packed clubs in this kind of daze is something I’ve gotten used to. No tea, no shots, no shower. Crumbs of sleep still guarding my eyes, a few yawns in the backseat and then let the catapult go. Stumble across a dance floor and around, behind a speaker. How I perform still seems to be something that I can’t control. Much depends on the crowd, and how they respond to a few things I try in the first thirty or forty minutes. Sometimes we sync, a direction forms between us. Other times it’s tetchy. A middle ground is found. It doesn’t totally satisfy either I sometimes think, but perhaps that is all in my own cloudy head.

Eventually the floor begins to thin and we find our talking points. I’m in a dubbier place, a place I know intimately and I’m settled. Covered in a kind of familiarity, the sleep before paying off. I find myself in this song.