Slipper sloth

As you can see I have remembered what my stunningly relevant blog post last week was going to be about. Slippers. This is peak Wanstead frankly. Or peak middle age. Probably both. So here's the question: With another six weeks of lockdown ahead of us during which we are largely confined to our homes, will people mostly be wearing slippers or will they be making a bit of an effort and wearing proper shoes? Note that I am assuming people actually make the effort to get dressed, rather than slumming it in their pyjamas and dressing gowns all day. If you are one of these people then please pull yourself together, it is no way to live.

I have been wearing shoes quite a bit, even if I don't step outside. I like shoes, as I have perhaps mentioned before, and I also think that in some ways you're not fully dressed unless you have shoes on. I have no qualms at all about wearing shoes indoors. For some though the mere thought of shoes on carpets and interior flooring is just a complete no no. Back in the distant days when we used to leave our houses and visit other people in theirs, how many asked that you take your shoes off before you came in? Quite a few I'd wager.

We are not that fussy, but nonetheless Mrs L thinks it is odd that I wear shoes inside on days where I am very unlikely to go outside. She wears slippers and would not even contemplate shoes as part of the working from home wardrobe. She probably won't even look at her shoes for the whole of this period, the exception being her walking boots for short bouts of 'essential exercise'. I just don't know about that. For starters when shoes do become necessary again it may feel rather strange putting them on. During one of the earlier lockdowns I think I went for about a week wearing only slippers and when I then tried to put shoes on they felt peculiar and somehow restrictive.

I own a lovely pair of wool slippers that during the night sit by the side of my bed with some laundry fresheners in them lest they get a bit pongy. When I swung my legs out it was almost instinctive that the first thing I did was to reach for my slippers. As I picked them up the question formed in my mind as to whether or not I would be wearing shoes later on that day or not, and whether this new lockdown meant I might not wear shoes for weeks and weeks. One of the last things I remembered to grab back in March 2020 when I left my office in Canary Wharf for the last time were my two pairs of black formal shoes that I wore on rotation. They have not been touched since, it is such a waste, and I just don't want my brown shoes to sit and gather dust in the same way.

Is wearing shoes a sign that you are serious and not slovenly? If you're working from home does getting fully dressed for work, including shoes, somehow put you in a different frame of mind? Are you more purposeful, more dynamic, more awake and raring to go? And does the near permanent wearing of slippers have the opposite effect? Do they render you somnambulant and soporific? I associate slippers with weekends and evenings, with routines linked to the day either having ended or not yet started. It is how I have been conditioned over many years, and so to have them as my only footwear for months at a time just seems really odd, yet another blurring of the boundary between work and home that I am trying unsuccessfully to remove. 

I just thought I would put it out there to see if anyone else had an opinion? Saves writing about birds at any rate.