New boots

Maybe New is pushing my luck - but there again, it's a suitable emphasis for the ritualistic orgy of consumption - or at least, the ritual of going shopping - before leaving NM for NJ - where I wouldn't know where to start looking for, say, such boots as these (though one of these days I will explore the western wear stores of New Brunswick: I wondered about their presence - for there are not many conspicuous rodeos around those parts - until a Saturday or Sunday night sometime at the end of last year, when we were driving back along 27 and saw the guys standing outside one of the Oaxacan clubs at the edge of town - El Corazon? - dressed in their best hats and pointy toed boots).

But these are hardly standard Western wear: they look as though a Doc Marten escaped and mated with a pair of traditional cowboy boots - in other words, as though some designer had seen me coming. For about twenty years I've tried to persuade my feet that they really did want to feel comfortable in a just slightly too small pair of black velvet DMs (very cool, I thought them, but they are fiendishly uncomfortable), and I have a sizable collection of cowboy boots, some of them very niftily hand-tooled, and bought from a store on the Kings Road, London, with the name of R. Soles. That's a pun that only works with an English accent. But these fit! And are comfortable! And even have pinkish-purple insides! With the semester looming, I'm reveling in being frivolous.