The Shoe Sole
Another thing missing from our lives is the detached shoe sole, severed and broken off from the body of the shoe, and found in the park grass, wasteland, or on tarmac. I guess that contemporary shoes are all of one piece, molded and cast as an homogenous unit, and can only be destroyed by grinding them up. We never see them fall apart.
Someone told me once of a pair of shoes in the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford that had belonged to an explorer. Whenever he found a piece of leather on a journey, he would take it and sew it onto his shoes. They became encrusted with repairs, almost the exact opposite of our sneaker-culture. I have been several times to the museum to try and find them, and even spoken to curators there. It proves to be mythic. SC
notes from an urban hibernation 