Guilty Pleasure

ne·ces·si·ty [nuh-ses-i-tee]–noun, plural -ties.

1. something necessary or indispensable: food, shelter, and other necessities of life.

Shoes are a necessity. Flat, heeled, buckled or zipped, shoes are complex pieces of equipment and whether you chose to admit or not they are needed. The perfect outfit can be chosen but without the right pair of shoes holds a potential disaster, they have the capacity to complete and save an outfit. No matter what size you are, no matter how big or how little, shoes will always look beautiful.

For Christmas 2009 I had no idea what I wanted. This was the first time in my life where I didn’t have an answer for something (a characteristic of mine that I promise I'm working on). Nothing stood out; maybe it was because there wasn’t anything that I particularly needed. After a lot of long hard thinking, I decided that shoes were the only option. I wanted a pair of boots to be more specific. Apart from that I had no requirements on what they looked like, or what colour they were. Just had to be boots.

Weeks passed and along with my siblings I lived in anticipation for whatever awaited me underneath the Christmas tree. I had already told myself that I’d be happy with whatever because quite frankly the brown, fake leather, New Look ankle boots weren’t really cutting it anymore. Christmas day came around, after the traditions had begun and breakfast had been eaten we all sat around the tree and the presents were distributed. It was my turn and like any typical girl I picked the biggest box with ‘Hannah’ written on it. The paper was immediately removed and there sat a shoebox with the words ‘Kurt Geiger’ written on it. I am definitely not a Kurt Geiger expert, ask me anything about Manolo and I got your answer but I hadn’t yet reached a sufficient level of shoe expertise to give you any kind of advice on Kurt Geiger. The things I did know however were, they were expensive, black and the heel would make me taller by only one inch. The leather already had that worn out look and the studs were equally distributed along the strap that crosses elegantly around the boot. They were flawless. Images ran through my mind of how I was going to where them, what I was going to wear them with and they somehow managed to look perfect with everything. They were just what I had wanted.

Its seven months on and I haven’t worn them once. They still lived in the box until a month ago. There is something about them that I don’t want to ruin. They are untainted. I don’t yet feel mature enough to expose a £100 pair of shoes to the ups and downs of a teenage world. For now they are not a reality, they are a designer pair of boots and that’s how I plan on keeping them until I feel that the pair of shoes and I can progress in life together. So for now they are simply just a guilty pleasure. You know, something pretty to look at.