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Shoes: How I hate buying them! I suppose it is because I can remember the days when new shoes always caused pain and blisters and had to be run in, as it were, like new cars. (When we had a new car, you had to go 1,000 miles at 30 miles an hour or less before you could go any faster. My father found it very frustrating, and so did I. He used to overtake just before reaching the brow of the hill, claiming to be able to calculate what was coming over the other side. I never understood how you could calculate such a thing, but there is nothing like danger to lend significance to life.) In the days when new shoes pinched, my feet would be placed in an X-ray machine in the shop to show that the shoes fit. But no matter what the X-ray showed, the shoes always rubbed and pinched within half an hour. In a way, it was a good thing”€”it taught you what a blessing it was to be pain-free.

Nowadays it is not so: All hail”€”glory to, in fact”€”modern shoemakers! The corollary is that it takes only a few minutes at most to find a decent pair of shoes, and there is no reason at all to linger over the choice, as over an old cognac after a meal. And yet the great mass of humanity seems unable to buy decent shoes. Look at people’s feet, how dreadfully they are shod! It isn”€™t even as if they are shod cheaply, which might be some kind of excuse or mitigation. No, what they wear is only cheap-looking, which is not the same thing as being cheap financially. Indeed, I knew people”€”my patients”€”who would go into debt to buy such cheap-expensive shoes. The distinctions in brand were as significant to them as the differences in the badges that the Great or Dear Leaders wore on their collars were to North Koreans.

I used to ask my patients what they were interested in. It was a question that terrified them. Eventually, after much searching of what psychological and therapeutic charlatans like to call their “€œinner space,”€ they delivered themselves, with as much pain and difficulty as that occasioned by the delivery of a breech baby, of a single word (I knew in advance what it would be): shopping.

“Shopping,” I said, “is not an interest. It is a lack of interest.” And they knew what I meant. Moreover, they were bad shoppers. They went for the meretricious as a dog goes for a cat. So what I say is: Workers of the world, unite for Sunday closing in Greece!