Consuming Interest

At Last

By LESLIE ADRIAN

THERE may be, as Falstaff believed, a divinity in odd numbers, but there is nothing but hell or expense in odd feet. In an age when `no one can think in terms of less than a thousand pairs'—as the manager of a multiple shoe store put it—those unlucky people who have one foot perceptibly larger than its mate, or some other slight deformity, have the bleak choice of being perpetually uncomfortable, pay- ing bespoke bootmakers' prices, or slopping around in sandals.

The mass-production shoe business is geared to produce a stupefying variety of styles and shades for both sexes—in a limited range of standard sizes. The glass-slipper girl, as far as shoeland is concerned, is the girl who can wear a 'B' fitting. The vast majority of shoes are made to suit her, in spite of the fact that for two out of three of her sisters 'B' fittings are too wide or too narrow. Unfortunately for everyone, there isn't a British Standard for feet.

However, even the mammoth of mass produc- tion has a soft under-belly. A reader who tells me that he has inherited his father's 'mis- shapen' feet, but not his capacity to pay a be- spoke shoemaker's bills, has just acquired, by courtesy of Dolcis, his first pair of shoes that really fit. 'Mr. Clore's Dolcis,' he writes, 'will make a pair of shoes in their standard range on your own lasts for the retail value of the shoes plus a 25 per cent. surcharge.'

This is not the sort of business that Dolcis want, as they wasted no time in telling me when I rang them; it is nothing but a nuisance to them. Only a very limited number of styles can be made to such a special order and the sur- charge is likely to be at least 50 per cent. (my correspondent was exceptionally lucky in both his branch manager and his choice of shoe), but Dolcis admit that in special cases they are pre- pared to help a regular customer—male or fe- male—who genuinely cannot wear any shoe taken from stock.

Two other firms prepared to do more than merely sympathise with the owners of prob- lematical feet are Medways (of Baker Street and the Whitechapel Road) and Lotus. Like Dolcis, both firms do it with great reluctance, as they get nothing out of such special orders except good- will.

Certainly there is nothing inevitable or streamlined about getting a machine-made shoe built to an individual last. The best that can be said is that with persistence and patience it is possible.

Before approaching the last-maker, see the branch manager of your local Lotus, Dolcis or Medway. When he stops trying to persuade you to drop the whole idea, he will get down to the business of showing you the type of shoe which he can get made to special order. The choice will be small, and naturally won't include any foreign-made shoes.

Last-makers are a dwindling craft (the Post Office Trade Directory lists six for the whole of London), but compared to the clog-making in- dustry, for which there are only two entries, the boys who build lasts are in a bustling line of 'business.

My correspondent who found his last-maker through the GPO directory described him as a `Mid-European troglodyte who worked in un-

'Do you think up your own ideas?'

believable squalor in the seamiest street in Soho. He had acquired an Anglo-Saxon name and charged me f6.' Checking up on some of the firms listed in the yellow directory, I found that one had gone out of business, and one was now working exclusively for a mass-production shoe- maker. But the majority were still making lasts for the private customer and charging him be- tween 51 and 6 guineas for the service.

There is sucha thing as progress after all. For years now everybody—customers, retailers and consumer-columnists—has complained about the mountains of -rubbish that come as 'free gifts' with packets of detergent. The customers object to paying more than they need for plastic roses, cheap cutlery and other things they don't want; the retailers object to dusting the plastic roses and watching the stacks of detergent packets fall 'down because the attached hardware makes it impossible to pile them up properly; and I object because their objections seem to me valid, and also because this sort of "gimmick' is only one example of the titanically wasteful use of ad- vertising and promotion by the detergent-manu- facturers, to the detriment of the user who would rather they lowered the price.

At last one of the detergent-manufacturers has caught up with the rest of us. Unilevers have announced that, at any rate for one of their detergents ('Surf'), they are to abandon the 'free gifts entirely, cut down on advertising and pro- Mellon in general (except for an advertising cam- paign for the new scheme, naturally), and pass the saving on to the consumer in the form of an increase in the amount of detergent in the packet. The increase is going to be no less than 18 per cent., and although they claim that they arc also going to be content with a smaller profit-margin, that figure is a revealing illustration of the cost to the consumer of the 'free' junk. But, we are warned, we are only on trial. A pilot scheme of this kind was launched in East Anglia and proved successful; it is now being extended to the London area. But if we do not rally round and buy gift- free detergents, they fear they will have to go back to the bad old ways. I think they ought to be encouraged, not because a sinner come to repentance deserves encouragement—Unilever are only doing this with one of their detergents, after all—but because, if the scheme is success- ful, it will force the other manufacturers to follow suit. And high time too.

Even the most informal hostess can occa- sionally need a formal tablecloth; and if the formal occasions arc too infrequent to warrant the purchase of an expensive tablecloth, the Linen Replacement Services, 79 Queensland Road, N7 (NORth 5378-9), come in handy as a stopgap.

For about 7s. 6d. a cloth and a shilling each for napkins, on what they call their 'Temporary Loan' service, one can hire a tablecloth (36 in. to 144 in.) for a dinner party. The cloth is de- livered to the house one day and picked up the next. Running short of linen over Christmas, I ordered a table cloth 96 in. by 54 in., and a brand-new one was delivered—the Replacement Services themselves had run low during the rusk and. had to hire out new Stock. With eight napkins, the cost came to 13s. 6d. Just to have the equivalent linen laundered at an ordinary laundry would cost 6s. 6d. (6d. per napkin, 2s. 6d. for large cloths).

Though the Linen Service hire out to hotels and restaurants as yell as to private individuals, they have rarely, according to the representative who delivered my cloth to me, had their linen damaged. Incidentally, he also said that the Only certain .way to destroy a linen tablecloth, other than burning it, is to spill wine on it when it is covering a green baize cloth.