Taking the shine off polish

‘Nugget,’’ he said, as if lamenting the death of a pet. ‘‘I was in the supermarket and I asked some young creature where the Nugget was and she said the what and I said the Nugget and she said she’d get the manager and the manager said they didn’t stock Nugget any more. Don’t stock Nugget? I said and she said no and that was that. What’s happened to the world?’’

And by way of illustration he brought his right leg out from under the pub leaner and it was tipped with one of those boots in which the foot ends half way along and the rest is a scimitar of shining leather. (Winklepickers we called them when I was a kid, though I had no idea what it meant to pick a winkle.) ‘‘Does noone polish their shoes any more?’’

And immediately I had an image of my school shoes on a piece of newspaper by the kitchen door and before leaving in the morning I had to kneel and buff them to a gleam. It was among my least favourite chores because so very Cinderellaish. But it is a redolent memory.

I feel again between finger and thumb the twin-horned device on the side of the tin that swivelled to lift the lid but sometimes didn’t. And I see the surface of a freshly-opened tin gleaming black like a moonlit lake and it seemed a shame to mar it with a finger wrapped in a rag.

But mar it you did and the stuff had a waxy rippling texture and gradually over the days and months the moonlit lake would become a concavity and then the metal base of the tin would show through and the remaining polish would recede to just an angled rim of black, a tiny roulette wheel that would never be wiped quite clean before the next tin was opened.

(Though not of Nugget. The shoe polish of my childhood was called Kiwi and it was one of the few things I knew of this country before I came here. But now I gather that Kiwi shoe polish was made in Melbourne, and only christened Kiwi out of homage to to the maker’s Oamaruvian wife. Nugget, on the other hand, which I had never heard of in my youth, was made in London. Today, of course, both brands are owned by global conglomerates.) A woman once told me she judged potential boyfriends by their footwear. Unpolished shoes were disqualifying, as were unpolishable ones. If he couldn’t be bothered then neither could she. Today she’d struggle to find love.

It is tempting to see the decline of Nugget as symptomatic of a decline in propriety. Time was when you dressed up to go out, even if only to the shops. You might be a slob in private but you pretended otherwise in public. Go to the mall today, however, and there are people dressed as if for a punk party, or a drunk’s sleep-over, or some sort of depraved athletic orgy in battered trackpants and outsize singlets. Some clearly keep a hedge to drag through backwards before presenting their selves to the world, or else an elaborate smearing and staining machine.

But the true culprit is the decline of leather. Dig a Roman fort and you’ll find remnant leather shoes. Dig a medieval bog and you’ll find remnant leather shoes. Dig my wardrobe and you’ll find Crocs and sneakers, synthetics that need no wax or unguent, no rich nostalgic Nugget. This is the Age of Petroleum.

‘‘The world moves on,’’ I said to Bootman. ‘‘Another beer?’’