Having recently been injured with both a broken leg and a broken arm, my perspective has been forcibly changed on public transport. I do not mean that my perspective has changed with regards the physical provision of access for less mobile passengers (because that has not changed an iota - we should provide things to help people as a matter of dignity) but rather, that because I am currently sitting either in the flat vestibule areas in the front and back of a train carriage or the flat open space on a bus, the things that I can see are slightly different.
Being seated at the front of the bus or in the vestibule areas of the train means that my eye level is now roughly a foot above the average height of people's butts. To be honest, this is not an enjoyable experience and if I could avoid it, I would choose to do so. This means that I am now spending a lot more time looking downwards at the floor and at the kinds of shoes that people are wearing.
What happened?
In the before times when people went forth and back to work on the trains and buses, people tended to wear more leather shoes. There is an expected minimum level of niceness in the business world. Ever since I was a wee lad, my preference has been for at least 8 hole boots, which I learned a very long time ago are not only acceptable in the business world but in a lot of cases signal a degree of seriousness or playfulness. Big black boots which extend beyond 8 holes to 10 and 14, sit underneath a pair of trousers, which means that they don't really look that much different to any other pair of black shoes. My black shoes in 2022 are the very rare exception, rather than the rule.
In 2022, the number of trainers that people are wearing is amazing. I do not recall this proportion of people wearing trainers on public transport in my working life. As a very large subset of people wearing trainers, there are also a lot of people who are wearing all white trainers. The population of white trainers is mainly made up of the typical kind of thing that you would expect such as Nike Air Force One, Adidas, Reebok and New Balance's analogues to them, as well as other more generic brands which are trying to act as clones for those headline acts. Have there always been this many people wearing white trainers?
When it comes to fashion and trends, I am about as on point and with it as the cool kids are with their leather jackets and greased hair. I am hip and happening. I'm groovy. I am so hip and happening that fashion trends may as well have come and gone before I have ever noticed. I hope that I have laboured the point. I am not at the cutting edge. I am not vanguard. Really, I am not rearguard either. In fact, the heat death of the universe and the obliteration of all things, with the elements melting and the heavens being rolled back like a scroll could have happened before I notice what the latest fashion trends are. Are white trainers really the hip happening thing of 2022 or am I so fossilised, so ignorant, so completely oblivious to what is trendy, that they could have been around for 20 years and have come and gone several times?
Or are they more like my Chuck Taylor All-Stars? Chuck Taylor wasn't a famous basketball player but a salesperson. He is possibly the most famous salesperson to have existed because after he'd become famous for hawking basketball shows, the Converse company decided to market a line of shoes bearing his name. Converse All-Stars debuted in 1917; which being 105 years ago means that they've been the latest thing and have then kept on coming back into and out of fashion. Are white trainers like that?
Clearly I do not know what the answer is. As my bank carpet grey eyes slowly drift ever out of focus and into silliness and as my days a fewer in number going forward than backward, perhaps I am too old and too doddery to have noticed. It could be that being forced to sit in places where I would not normally has forced me to look at slightly different things or it could be that I just don't like the surfeit of people's butts less than two feet from my face. Thank you, but I'm going to look at everyone's shoes instead.
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