Loveable Brogue

I am on the hunt for new shoes again. Never an easy task because I have, well... a bit of an obsessive issue with footwear. By which I mean I am obsessed with quality, rather than quantity.

My old rubber-soled brogues fell apart at the turn of the year. I blame myself for buying American. The spiritual home of the brogue is in these islands and even the best of foreign makes will never be...quite right. In this case, the Gant brogues I purchased simply fell apart. I think they were probably designed primarily for driving large cars with, rather than walking on.

I accept, incidentally, that there will be those who might blanche at the thought of rubber-soled shoes. Indeed, I would generally be one of them. Rubber soles are for sporting and military footwear, industrial safety boots and the like. They are not for shoes a chap would wear around town.

However, I am a man of the world and I take the view that as brogues are meant to be worn in the countryside, where it is inevitably muddy and wet, then it follows that they should be waterproof. I know this was originally achieved with thick double leather soles but that is rather like wearing clogs. I am confident that the rubber dainite sole is entirely in keeping with the rugged ethos of the full brogue. Indeed, I would suggest that it allowed the proper country brogue (in a rich, grain burnished calf, of course) to achieve its functionalist apogee.

Now my dear old Uncle Mac, of whom you will hear more, would no doubt ask me what possible reason I might have for wanting shoes to be waterproof, living in Town (or somewhere within striking distance of it) as I do. This is because his idea of desperate conditions is the presence of puddles underfoot as he totters down St James to his vintner's. Mac avoids the country when possible, considering it to be the haunt of uncultured humanity and, more worryingly, unfettered nature. I respect his position, but I do not share it. One should be able to put on a pair of brogues and travel, with equal assurance and comfort, to the tobacconist's or to Timbuctoo.

They are, to my mind, the shoes that won the Empire.

And I am damned if I am going to lower my standards just because a parcel of rogues and imbeciles have subsequently lost it.