The Clicking Dichotomy

A little background, if you will. While you read this post, listen to this:

And look at this:

So... It's dark. It's the 1940s. You're hunched over the bar in a smoky dive off 45th Street, trenchcoat loosely hanging, fedora pulled down, nursing a double whisky, no ice, head heavy with thoughts of your no-good son of a gun partner who folded quicker than a chancer with a 5 buck chip and a pair of twos. Suddenly, a sound punctures the gloom and stirs your from your reverie. An unmistakable sound; a sound somehow staccato and piercing, but at the same time long, languorous and deeply sensual. Footsteps approaching you. Click...clack...click...clack...

All right, stop! (Collaboration and listening optional) I'd just like to digress at this point and explain something to those who don't know me. Despite a brief dalliance with the world of flowery print dresses in my late teens which has left me with a severe allergy to the works of Sandie Shaw, I'm not one of life's glamourpusses. My wardrobe choices tend to revolve around two questions: a) is it jeans? and b) no, really, wouldn't you rather buy some jeans? And recently, when it was raining and snowing and generally being of and about winter, and my meagre collection of trainers all simultaneously wailed and ripped themselves asunder in an impassioned expression of grief at the apparent death of the sun, I bought myself some boots of the brown, biker, buckles'n'leather persuasion. Like this:

Mm. Boots. And it was fine. But then: I wore them outside.

Cast your mind back to two paragraphs ago. Who did you picture coming into the bar? This?

Or this?

The point is this. My biker boots have, for some reason, got incredibly clicky heels. When I walk around in them, it sounds like Little Miss Tottering, mayoress of Totteridge and Whetstone, just got herself some really precarious shoesies. To the casual listener, when I am approaching round a darkened street corner, or across a pub's wooden floor, I sound like Rita Hayworth. Then I appear, and I'm a potato in a German army jacket.

OK, not that bad, but there's been a definite statistical increase in the proportion of faces dropping I've seen in recent weeks. I'm just hoping I don't get sued for false advertising. Or try and spin a whole blog post out of the surprising sound my new shoes make. Even if it's an excuse to listen to some Barry Adamson.

Sorry. To make it all better, here's a picture of a patient Japanese cat:

Ahhhn.