The Steaming Rants of Ernie Wight

Dead Men's Shoes

Dead men's shoes fit strangely on the feet. Unlike new shoes, they lack the suppleness that allows them to be moulded to your way of walking. Because they have already been moulded to someone else, it is easier to adapt your own stance to fit in with the shoes dictates. I worry that my personality will also start to develop other traits than my own. I swear that's why a couple of times I've braked at the wrong place, or shot through a red light. Dead men's shoes come cheaply enough, but have a hidden price.

I'm wearing them again. The last time was back when the Falklands war was starting, but more significantly for me, the fishing industry was in serious trouble. Foreign boats, allowed into our waters to fish, were able to put their catch on our markets at a lower price than British boats could. The foreign governments subsidised the fuel bills. With the additional subsidy of road haulage fuel bills, a Dutch boat could send filleted plaice to Lowestoft market at a price we couldn't come close to. All around the British Isles the fishing boats started to lay idle alongside mouldering jetties. When our manager was replaced by a senior company figure who had already wound up the company branches in Aberdeen and Fleetwood we knew what was coming. I jumped ship and headed for London.

I had always meant to go to the smoke, and having taught myself some electronics and computer programming, thought it was time for a crack at the big time. It wasn't that simple, and it took me two years of doing low-level work in loading bays, office basements, and delivery vehicles before I got my break and began to work as an engineer again. Two years of walking 5 miles each way in and out of Central London to dingy squats because the tube fare cost more than the loaf of bread and jar of peanut butter that formed a subsistence diet, (I couldn't claim unemployment benefit because I had not been fired). And of course, all that walking took a toll on shoes. Cheap new shoes only lasted a few weeks, and I discovered that the charity shops sold perfectly good shoes for a quarter of the price of the shoddy new ones.

It was a relief to break out of the poverty trap and start walking around in decent footwear again. It was also good to have a mentally-challenging job, and some semblance of self-esteem. After several years of contract employment and a three-year spell of permanent employment I felt confident enough to buy somewhere to live. Twenty years later, living in a different place, I rented premises in which to house a collection of old hardware (PDP-11s. Microvaxes, HP Unix boxes), and spent all three days over Christmas 1999 ensuring that a several Nuclear power stations would be able to meet the deadlines for proving that they were Y2K-compliant and therefore able to generate over the millennium, then went off to compete in the Rally of the Vales as a celebration.

In London in the early eighties I struggled to find work An ex-Chief Engineer from deep-sea trawling was of no use to offices and factories. And in the New millennium, I found that a Software Engineer with big-system experience was no use to rural Dorset industries. I was over-qualified, and put on dead men's shoes again to deliver the White Stuff. Dead men's shoes stay dry for a day, but I need three pairs in order to have dry shoes to put on at 1:00 in the morning. Why on earth did am I doing this ? I never wanted to be a milkman - I wanted to be a -