In our febrile world, the smallest change is worrying
On Wednesday I went clothes shopping for the first time since the pandemic began. It wasn’t exactly retail therapy. I have reached the stage of life where one approaches the changing room with apprehension, eyes screwed up against the unforgiving mirror. Sure enough, it took me three hours of increasingly frenzied robing and disrobing to find a party dress that didn’t make me look like Robin Day stuffed into a spangled Tubigrip.
As for party shoes: there are none out there. None that I could understand, anyway. There are flat velvet loafers with festive embroidery on the toes, and flat sequinned mules and – very 2021, these – flat fluffy slippers, bejewelled in such a way as to indicate that they can be worn for revelries, as well as for putting out the bins.
Covid appears to have finally killed off high heels, just as the fashion punters said it would. This is wonderful news – the long-overdue liberation of the female foot – so why am I unnerved?
I think you might call it Change Fatigue. The political and social convulsions of recent years have proved so fraying on the nerves that one is always on high alert for another drama cresting the horizon. Even the smallest shift in societal behaviour now demands closer inspection, in case it should prove to be a symptom – or worse, a portent – of something bigger.
Why are there no high heels? Is it because we are all gender-neutral now? And what does it mean that I can’t get an Uber home? Is Brexit to blame, or the pandemic, or some deeper failing of the modern economy? Might it turn out to be a good thing – perhaps the black cab will stage a miraculous comeback, like the blue whale, once its predators disperse – or is this just a temporary hiatus before Silicon Valley unleashes upon us a new army of android taxis, currently gestating in pods?
For most of my lifetime, nothing seemed to change much, even when it did. The forward momentum of Western capitalist democracy felt settled, and therefore almost invisible. Then came the digital revolution, and all the cultural and consumer revolutions that have spiralled out of it.
And now nothing – not even the high heel, that impractical, agonising, perversely enduring invention of the 10th century – can be counted on to last.
Ignoring the maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered with a confident no, the BBC News website ponders: “Would the world be better if it was run by teenagers?”
Well, really. As if things weren’t dicey enough.
I actually love teenagers – more than ever now that my house is often full of them. I find them extremely sympathetic, for all the same reasons they would be terrible at running the world.
They forget or lose everything: homework, shoes, nuclear codes. They process information through their amygdala – aka the lizard brain – because their rational pre-frontal cortex is not yet fully formed, and this means they have patchily informed but thunderous opinions on everything. They care desperately about fitting in with their peers, which makes them acutely susceptible to groupthink. And they can never, ever admit to being wrong.
Be sensible, Auntie. We have quite enough leaders like that already.