I don’t know how long they’ve been there. But I first saw them some months ago. High above the streetfront of Mole Creek’s Fire Station. Suspended on power lines. A pair of sports shoes. Tied together by their laces. I don’t know why someone tossed them up there. I don’t know who it was. And neither do my Fire Brigade mates. The shoes have stayed there. Even during the 16 September gale [1]. Every time I go to, or past, the Fire Station I look up to see if they’re still there. And they are. The power company, Aurora Energy, hasn’t bothered to remove them. For me those shoes have remained an enigma. But as Violet Fane wrote: ‘Ah, all things come to those who wait’ [2]. In last Tuesday’s Age, an piece by writer Toni Jordan [3] validated my perplexity about sports shoes hanging from power lines, provided some causal theories, and even disclosed its name: shoefiti. A google search on ‘shoefiti’ revealed thousands of citations [4]– including a Wikipedia page [5], a shoefiti website [6], and a revelation – that should’ve been obvious to me, but wasn’t – that shoefiti’s a compound word derived from ‘shoe’ and ‘graffiti’ [7]. So shoefiti, like much in our fast moving and every morphing world, is something that’s been around for a while yet passed me by. Until recently. The question occurs to me that hypothetically had I known of shoefiti sooner, whether my life would’ve been any the better for it. Ho hum.
2 comments:
I've known about and noticed pairs of shoes hanging from power lines for years. We even have an old pair of Jazzy's hanging from the wisteria trellis here. Still, I did not know until now about the word shoefiti and I cannot wait to use it in conversation asap.
WOW we have an excellent case of shoefiti in our city there are about fifteen to 20 pairs of runners over a set of wires close to a bridge, I think they can throw the shoes down from the bridge Onto the wire, much easier than tossing them up and having them clout you on the head on their way down.
I hadn't heard the name either so I am looking forward to using it publically.
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