A red shoe, the matrix, Catherine Bush, Madness...

As the people here grow colder
I turn to my computer
And spend my evenings with it
Like a friend.
I was loading a new programme
I had ordered from a magazine:

Yes, I know that friendship, my friend my computer, so easy to become close and only communicate through him and it seems that it’s even got to poor old madcap Kate. Well, when I say poor she’s actually stinkingly wealthy and I wouldn’t exactly call fifty-three old. As for the madcap thing – well, sanity is pretty relative isn’t it? I’m sure that compared to - let’s say George III - Kate Bush is practically without a trace of hysteria or in any need of therapy at all.

Yes, sanity is pretty relative which is partly what this post is about.

Even so, I never had her down as one of those people who would give up hill-running and the sensual world to live in the matrix, but then if it can happen to me then why not her? And vice versa - Blue pill, red pill Kate? You take the red pill: you stay in Wonderland. I wonder which magazine she ordered her new programme from - Horse and Hounds?

So just why am I wittering on about Catherine Bush for the second time in as many months?

Well, it was the red shoe you see.
The red shoe? You ask.
Yes, the red shoe, the red ballet shoe.
What red ballet shoe? You ask.

I’m glad you asked me that, it’s been bothering me since it happened.

I was wandering down to Sainsbury’s yesterday and as I went to cross the road by the Baptist church – glancing to the left and to the right, so as to be sure not to be knocked down by that proverbial bus, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a tiny red ballet shoe on the pavement. Now when I say tiny, I really do mean tiny, it couldn’t have been more that a couple of inches in length and bore the legend ‘So Danca’ printed on its inner sole. To all intent and purpose it was a miniature red silk ballet shoe - how strange.

So I reached into my pocket and snapped off a couple of pictures with my camera phone as you do - well, at least as I do.

Such a tiny shoe – to give you an idea just how small, those paviours are the same size as house bricks. It puzzled me. Just who could wear such a tiny shoe, and who would want to dance (ballet, tap, even ballroom) on the pavement at the end of our road?

Maybe that shoe was a kind of voodoo, maybe it stepped out of the matrix (red pill, blue pill) or maybe it simply dropped in from Wonderland or Oz – want to play ball Scarecrow? I don’t know. But like I said, it’s been bothering me ever since. You see, I can’t get rid of the image of a tiny porcelain dancer - a mechanised doll, given life by a programme bought from a magazine. In my mind I see her pirouetting along the pavement in the moonlight, a curve for her smile, a cross for her heart, and a line for her path. She’s moving like the Diva do, unable to stop until the shoes come off, the shoes making her dance until her legs fall off. That’s how she lost the shoe I think.

See… I told you it was relative.

That shoe’s gone now. I checked this morning. I wonder if the doll came back for it and I wonder why - but not nearly enough to wander along in the darkness to the end of the road tonight.