Colouring in for grown ups

For the past few days I’ve been stuck at home with the dreaded Swine Flu. It turns out that the dreaded lurgy has just made me a bit spinny headed, so, lucky me! er, yay?

Anyway, even being flaked out on the sofa watching Buffy for the umpteenth time loses it’s shine after a while. So I’ve reverted to one of my more expensive daft pastimes, Trainer painting. Unfortunately, not being made of moolah I haven’t got spare blank ones to hand, so I have ordered a shiny white pair of Puma’s to daub over and have been making mock ups with the aid of photo shop. For you lot out there with money though, there is a much easier and less messy way of doing this via the miracle of the internet. Both Nike and Puma have online design your own trainer service. You can have endless hours of fun turning out countless designs in any colour-way you fancy. Converse have a version to, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to ship outside the states, plus their standards international shipping charges would probably make it cheaper to fly of and pick them up yourself anyway.

Word of warning, they aren’t cheap but even if you don’t decide to buy it is an amusing way to while away a couple of woozy hours while smitten with flu.

NIKEiD.com

Puma Mongolian BBQ (make your own shoes)

Blockaboots – The best shoes (n)ever made.

Being a typical crap bloke who won’t go to the doctors unless I lose a limb in a random chainsaw accident I have been trying to treat my knackered ankle by wearing basketball boots. Apparently, due to all this 80′s retro business that is oh so popular at the moment, hi tops are very “in”.

So there I was, trawling through ebay for said footwear when a thought struck me. What would be the only retro shoe that could definitely never come back into fashion?  The answer was clear, the Blockaboot!

The what? I hear you ask.

Well…

Back in 1976 there was a schools television program called Good Health, the sort of thing you would end up watching if you were off school for the day. Being the seventies, there was nothing else on during the day. It was either that or the test card. The premise of one particular episode was to promote the wearing of sensible footwear by suggesting that everyone’s feet would go on strike (did I mention this was 70′s Britain?) if they were forced to wear ill fitting shoes.

The example of bad footwear was pretty much a sandal on stilts with another sandal stuck to the base. Unfortunately, the whole lesson of the show was lost on me and for the past thirty odd years I have dearly wished to own a pair. The disappointment I felt when I realised that they were fictional footwear was one of the most profound of my life.

I guess the nearest thing ever brought into production was Vivienne Westwood’s Rocking Horse Shoe but they were actually well designed, if somewhat scary (See left). What I want is something that is utter rubbish, ridiculous and will give me endless hours of fun tottering about the house in. In short, the perfect style item.

So if you are in the shoemaking industry, please make me some blockaboots. Or preferably, make enough for the whole world as wars could never be fought if everyone was shuffling about at one mile a day on a rickety platform shoe tied on by a piece of ribbon.

You can see the original t.v show here…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tKBPl3VZXg

Secret Base. Mmmmmm………..

Being of the skint starving artist type (Well I would be if it wasn’t for Lidl) I spend an awful lot of time coveting stuff I can’t afford. Somewhere on the top of this list of unattainable wonders is nearly everything I see on the Secret Base website. I often wonder whether I would be so keen on it if it wasn’t so damnably hard to get hold of. Even looking at the website is a trial. For a start you will probably have to install Kanji fonts on your pooter, then you have to reload it half a dozen times to actually get the page buttons to work. Once you have all this sorted you can ogle the weird and wonderful plastic toys and weirdly out of context fashion accessories. Zombie Dennis the Menace in Japan? And British Dennis the Menace at that!

You might even think about trying to buy something…  If you want to take that thought a stage forward, may your god help you. Firstly, you will realise that you haven’t a hope in hell of fitting into the clothes as they are so very tiny. Secondly, once you convert the price/telephone number from yen you will wish you hadn’t bothered as you will then need to crawl under a rock and wait for that long lost rich relative to pop their clogs. If you are still not put off, you can e-mail them to enquire about getting your potential purchase sent to you only to be told the next day that it is sold out. (Can you tell I’ve had personal experience of this?) Anyway, it’s lovely , lovely stuff and if you own any, please don’t tell me about it because I will cry.

http://www.secret-b.com/