Showing my roots.

I sat at my laptop, staring at a blank blog entry page for a good ten or twelve minutes this evening. I've not written anything for a while and today I told myself that, before I put my head on my pillow tonight, I'd have written something new. I've had blogs, diaries and sketchbooks before. They all ended a month or two down the line. Not this one. Not six/six. This is too important. And not just for me. You, the reader, how are you supposed to know which variety of apple you'd be best sneaking into a nightclub, why I drink so much beetroot juice or what to do if Jehovah's Witnesses are chasing you down the street.

I swiveled around on my chair and looked around my room for inspiration. There wasn't much to inspire me. A wireless printer, a playstation, a few candles here and there. Shirts hanging off a chair. I'm not ironing them today. I've a blog to write! Bah. Nothing here to spark my imagination. I swung back around to my laptop but, mid swing, I stopped.
I smiled. I boiled the kettle, took two photos and took my laptop into the sitting room to write this while watching the Bake-Off.

There it is. That's my inspiration. Not the wardrobe, I should point out. I bought that wardrobe quite recently, for not very much from a Barnardos charity shop down Leith Walk. The wardrobe that was initially in my room was a godawful white laminate chipboard atrocity that was falling apart from the off. While it was probably designed to be rectangular, it spent its time in my room impersonating a parallelogram. It wobbled. It slanted to the left, it slanted to the right. The doors swung open unless held shut with a kettlebell (see above). Even though I had the opportunity to choose its successor, the brown one you see the bottom of in the picture isn't a whole lot better. It looks nice, yes, it has a full length mirror and plenty of shelves but it's BRUTAL quality. The sides are thin, half the dowels aren't in and won't go in properly and it came without a rail for hangars. I get the feeling that swearing loudly nearby would cause it to fall apart.
But my wardrobe isn't what inspired me. Look closer.
No, wait, actually, look somewhere else entirely.

There're the shirts I'm not ironing. But look at the shoes. They're my Kermit the Frog runners. I must've bought them eight years ago. Now look at the first picture. The slippers. Do you see?

I've only noticed this now, but my shoes are always left around my room in that arrangement. One before the other. And, to my knowledge, only one type of people do that.

Farmers.

There's a very specific way to take off your wellies when you come in for tea and sandwiches at 1.00. You use one the toe of one welly to hold down the heel of the other, swing around to do the other and, with both heels free, you step out of the wellies to go in and watch the news. As I grew up it was pretty much guaranteed that, at ten past one on any given afternoon, there'd be at least one pair of wellies outside the back door arranged in a straight line.

Have you seen Inglorious Basterds? Do you remember the scene where Michael Fassbender's character orders three drinks and blows his cover by holding up three fingers in the wrong way? Hold on, I'll go look.

There you go. Apparently in Germany, it's convention to extend your thumb and first two fingers to denote "3", as opposed to what Mike above is doing.

My slippers/runners made me think of that. I've not thrown silage to cattle in years now and my feet have long forgotten the feeling of wellies on them. But yet that's how I still take my shoes off. Heel to toe and leave them in a straight line.
It's how I do things.

And it's how I always will.