Boots Theory

I have been cleaning up my wardrobe, as spring comes earlier and earlier and I start bringing up summer clothes in March. When I see some of my old clothes I cannot help but reflect on Captain Vimes' Boots Theory. Captain Vimes is one of the established characters in Terry Pratchett's Discworld, and he has  a worthwhile philosophy that the poor remain poor because they cannot buy good quality objects, so they end up spending much more than the rich people, whose expensive boots will last much longer than the cheap ones.

I have changed quite a lot in the last twenty years. Yet I still have quite a lot of clothes, objects and hardware which are older than that. In terms of clothes, the oldest is probably an Austrian winter coat I bought with one of my first salaries / grant money for my Ph. D. The first one went to a Sony music tower that "only" lasted for 25 years, and anyway I no longer have magnetic tapes, and my music CDs are kept in storage. Maybe it is because I only wear it a few days every year, in this new warm climate, but it is still going strong after 33 years. 

A lot of clotes date from my wedding, 23 years ago, including a suit that miraculously still fits me, considering the extra 30 kg, or a couple of shirts, and one set of ceremony shoes that have attended quite a few additional weddings since.

Which makes me think that there is another factor to the Boots Theory that Vimes did not consider. Another aspect of wealth is having the place to keep all those long lasting, high quality objects you get. Because no matter how long they last, if you do not have the place for ceremony shoes you use twice a year, or a long coat you wear one week a year, you will have to get rid of them. The main reason I keep all my old laptops (6 so far, with the oldest from 1994, and yes I change roughly every five years) is that I have the place for them, even if the possibility I need to read a 31/2 diskette is very low, as it is my need to revisit Windows 1 or MS-DOS 5.1. Another reason why the wealthy can afford to keep all those solid wood chairs from great-grandmother Elsa in some spare room, while normal people need to get rid of the useless things. 

Space is a luxury, and storage space even more so, and it is actually money. So, the fact that my traveling boots are fifteen years old and have walked several hundreds kilometers is remarkable, as two previous ones failed, one of them catastrophically, in one or two years, but it is also remarkable that I could keep those boots (probably in their last hundred km already) for two years of pandemic when I did not bring them out. Because I did not need the space they occuppy. 

Our friends with children complain that we do many things they cannot do because we have more disposable income, and that is certainly true. But we also have more space, because our medium size appartment is more than enough for two, and we do not need to share it, or to liberate space for visits, growing children or ailing relatives. People propose us to buy a bigger house, or to get a holiday residence, but why? this is a good size for us. not too much work to keep clean and well ordered, where we have our assigned space we distribute as we wish, and which we administer as we see fit.

There is still a small problem. Books. I still prefer physical books to electronic, specially for books I like. So once a year I have to do a culling, picking what books I am fairly sure I will never wish to read, again and which lack any emotional load, and donate them. We could get a storage space and keep them. Once when I complained our friends suggested we could buy a bigger house, but we already have two rooms devoted to shelves and books, and it feels as more than enough. So I have come to embrace the culling as a way to refresh my book collection. Often the culling brings a reread, to decide if it really is worthy of staying, or if it will be better in somebody else's hands. And always the temptation to sacrifice something else, like getting rid of those useless electronics so I can keep a dozen extra books...

But it will never be enough, so I restrict the books to the shelves, because any reprieve by sacrificing other space will be temporary. As time passes more I get more and more specialized books in electronic form. Bulky books that I do not expect to read for pleasure. So work books and games, mostly RPGs, are now all electronic, residing in different states in the laptop assembly and a couple of external drives. Another reason to keep them, as auxiliary memory. As part of the recent review of the last twenty years I have fired up the old laptops to check the old mail archives. Memory. Something that takes space, and therefore money. I still have not revisited my collection of notebooks, around twenty, mostly Moleskines, kept in a drawer in my bedroom. Another luxury, keeping notes that I am hard pressed to reread again. Another benefit of being well off.

¶ 12:34 PM

 Restart

Almost eight years later, I feel the need to once again return to this soapbox to post my reflections and experiences. The first step was rereading what I had written before, resisting the temptation to rewrite or delete some entries, changing the memory of some events. But I have so far held fast, as considering the feeble readership this blog had in its long gone "good times", that would be akin to cheating in solitaire. A pointless exercise.

A coming anniversary has made me review the last twenty years in my life, and this blog, although a bit younger, was close behind that event, and it reflects a good part of the first ten years of those twenty. I also miss the exchanges with a few close correspondents, which the reread has brought sharply into focus, as well as how good my written English was back then, compared to my current level of skill.

I intend to write more to friends, and I also would like to put some of those letters here as well, to avoid the loss that represents sending a written letter, a hostage of my mind sent to someone else, to be kept as we keep their own mind hostage. Pieces of ourselves that we share. Copying handwritten letters always seemed to me like cheating. But writing a draft of what I wish to say, and keeping it as a placeholder, probably to be published some time after the letter is sent, that feels a way to keep them available to myself, and maybe to others. Hubris, of course, to believe my words merit to be kept. But maybe this is part of my ambition to become a writer one day, as that is the common ambition of almost all aspiring writers, that we have something worthwhile to write, and that others will wish to read it.

The auspices are not good. This restart is mainly fueled by nostalgia for something that will never come back, supported by the purpose of writing more when I do not have enough free time in my days. But at the same time this same nostalgia trip has tapped some reserves of energy that I thought exhausted a long time ago. So we will have to see how it goes.

¶ 12:21 PM