In Danger of Clogging

There has been a footwear theme in the commentary of late, loyal and patient reader, which has prompted me to consider a couple of things that have vexed me in the past from time to time.

The other day I was wondering what became of the actors who played the children Buffy and Jodie in the American situation “comedy” “Family Affair” in the sixties or whenever it was.

Naturally, whenever one thinks of former child actors one assumes that they developed a drug habit and were arrested at the age of 23 holding up a convenience store with a screwdriver. That is pretty much invariably the case, but it is nice to know for sure.

Anyway, I cannot think of “Family Affair” without thinking of Mr. French, the family manservant. You will recall, or if you do not I hope you will take my word for it, that this august and generous factotum was played by Sebastian Cabot. Whenever I hear that name, I cannot help interchanging the first letters and ending up with the surname “Sabot”.

Sabots are a type of wooden footwear used in parts of France.

Mr. French.

France.

It is so unlikely a co-incidence that I am sure that when we find out what is behind it we will know what was going on at the grassy knoll.

When I start thinking about sabots, I am reminded of an interesting piece of information passed on to me by a student teacher when I was in about the third year of my primary schooling.

It seems that in the early days of the industrial age, workers who felt that their needs were being ignored were given to putting their sabots into the machinery, thus bringing work to a halt and giving themselves the opportunity for some much needed folding of the hands in quiet contemplation. This, as is well known, gave rise to the expression “Sabotage”, meaning the deliberate damaging of machinery or equipment to gain an industrial or military advantage.

There are those naysayers who insist that my teacher was wrong. These people suggest that it would be unusual to put your shoes into the machinery when a rock would work just as well. They think that the miscreant would be easily detected by the bareness of his feet. Why, they ask, would you deprive yourself of footwear and expose yourself to detection for no reason?

In their dreary way they point to the fact that there is not one single reported instance of machinery ever having been damaged by the insertion of wooden footwear and suggest that the provenance of the expression is more comfortably associated with the fact that “sabot” is the name given to a type of railway tie that, if removed, will result in the derailing of a train. They say that this was a method used by military saboteurs and that the word first came into use at the time that this practice started.

What claptrap. My teacher told me in grade 3 that European workers were smashing up the looms and trudging home through the snow in stockinged feet. It may not make sense, but why does it have to? Knitting doesn’t make sense, but who would deny knitting?

The information provided by my teacher is good enough for me and I am sure it is good enough for the rest of you. This was a student teacher after all and not some appalling ignoramus who could barely get through high school and thought nothing of imposing their own lack of the spirit of enquiry on the developing minds of the young.

Having dealt with that there is one further challenge that I would like to address. Thick bootlaces or thin ones?

I have been grappling with this for some time.

For starters, most boots don’t have laces at all except army boots and Doc Martens. Oh, football boots too.

It is my understanding, possibly from the same grade 3 student teacher, that originally pretty much all types of footwear were called “boots”. I don’t know whether that is because everyone wore what we would now call boots or because the name was used to cover what we would now call shoes.

Assuming the latter to be the case, it is understandable that “shoes” entered the language to cover the fancier, neater footwear and “boots” was retained to cover the heavier items that cover the ankle.

One might easily imagine that the expression “bootlaces” could have survived even though the said laces were more generally used in shoes. I do not deny that the expression “shoelaces” is sometimes used, but I certainly do blame the French for that.

There are so many factors in the thick v thin bootlace issue. Eyelet size, extent of fraying of broken lace, required length of lace, whether you need them yellow ones like with some Docs, synthetic or natural fibre and black or tan are just some considerations. I have taken them all into account and weighed them carefully. It is pleasing that I am able to say that the answer is thin. Preferably waxed, but certainly thin.