Colm O'Regan: Putting on a pair of slippers after a hard day’s work is hedonistic
Documentation photograph of slippers belonging to Michael Collins. Image courtesy of the National Museum of Ireland.
At least now I know what I want for my birthday in May: new slippers.
Even before Michael Collins’ slippers hit the news last week, I had been eying them up. Not the wolf ones. I don’t think I’m Independence Leader/Retired Heavy Metal Musician/Lynx User enough to qualify for them. Although I am a fan of rewilding. No, I’ve been circling some ‘Moccasins with Freshfeet Technology’ from Marks and Spencer. I’ve always felt that I would become the kind of man who needs moccasins. They could change my life. Just now, I’m imagining wearing a pair, while leaning on the verandah of a house in the Côte d'Azur having written another chapter in my Great American Novel about a hurler who goes on a voyage of self-discovery across a crumbling near-future. (Working title: ‘Take The Points And The Goals Will Come.’)
I like the sound of ‘Freshfeet Technology’. It sounds essential to the Slipper Experience, almost as essential as “fabricado en Vietnam”.
Shopping for slippers brings you into the world of slipper-buying reviews. It’s almost exclusively women buying them for their husbands (frequently hubbies), apart from one man who says resignedly that he didn’t get slippers from anyone for Christmas so he had to buy them himself. But even he’s happy. He’s not alone. There are pages and pages of it.
These are my people now. People like Greg from Sussex who had formed a strong attachment to his “old faithful” pair of slippers that he had recently” laid to rest” and was concerned he wouldn’t find a worthy successor.
I know there are some of you, the physical-force slipper wearers who see me talking about M&S slippers and bristle. Maybe you feel this attachment to the crown slipper is exactly the sort of quisling, West Brit, cap-doffing attitude that kept this country under the ‘textile and other materials’ outsole’ heel of the Saxon for too long. To which I would reply. Collins was a pragmatist. He knew that wolf slippers were a stepping stone to further achievements. A slippery slope, if you will. He’d at least give a moccasin a fair hearing.
We often hear “Pipe and slippers” as a pejorative term implying that someone lacks adventure or eschews risky pleasure for safety. It starts early in life. Rather like learning Irish, we may have been turned off slippers in school. Schools enforced an Indoor Shoes policy and putting on slippers was relegated to the status of tiresome chore.
This is unfair. Putting on a pair of slippers after a hard day’s work (even if your work consists of philosophising on the benefits of slippers) is one of the most hedonistic things you can do. Your toes give an excited wiggle, you groan in pleasure. Anyone listening at the keyhole would think that One of Those Parties was going on.
The advertising industry needs to keep up, to realise slippers are sexy. We need black and white ads with a woman, dressed only in an oversized man’s shirt, walking along by a white wall, backwards for some reason. Looking at the camera in a way that suggests there will be some sort of riding soon. The camera cuts to a man sitting on a pier staring off towards the sea. Cut back to the woman as she ponders a ladybird on her arm. Back to the man who is now doing non-contact martial arts on a beach with friends of different races. “Wear me like a slipper” says the voiceover. Then fade to black. In small white writing, it appears, in silence….
‘Moccasin’ BY CALVIN KLEIN.
