At a recent editorial meeting with chairs pulled up, notebooks on laps and legs folded, it became clear that the favourite shoes of a young colleague had seen better days.
Or at least, the heels of the shoes had.
“Time to get those heeled,” said a colleague on the wrong side of 40.
The younger journalist looked nonplussed.
“What do you mean?”
“Get new heels on them.”
“Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In a shoe repair shop.”
“Can you still get those?”
Funny how the younger generation have turned their back on the art of shoe mending.

Oxfords
When Squinter was at school everybody wore Oxfords.
And the only thing better than a new pair of Oxfords was a pair of Oxfords that had just been heeled, because when the shoemaker heeled your shoes he inserted a small quadrant of steel where the heel touched the ground.
It was designed to make the heel last longer, but more importantly, in St Mary’s the sound echoed round the corridors so satisfying that anyone whose shoes didn’t click was out of the loop.
They call them geeks today.

New heels
So desperate were students to be part of the in-crowd that local shoe-menders were often tasked with replacing heels on shoes that hadn’t yet been worn.
There was a cheap option.
For 50p or so you could buy a bag of studs for your heels – small pieces of metal that traced the curve of the heel and out of which three short spikes protruded.
A poor man’s way of protecting a shoe, they could be easily hammered in and produced much the same noise as a full heel job.

Height of fashion
But fashion being fashion, you couldn’t let anybody see the heels of your shoes because the DIY option was considered terminally uncool.
That’s all a thing of the past, of course.
But demand for good shoe-menders continues.
The customer base has changed considerably.
No more do schoolboys queue up to have their heels shod, their shoes (if indeed they wear shoes) are designed to be thrown out when the heel wears down.
The school market is, to all intents and purposes, dead and the only customers left are adults who buy decent shoes.

New lease of life
So off went Squinter’s young colleague with the name and address of the mender in his notebook, and back he came the next day, £12 poorer, but his shoes (slip-on, brown, vaguely pointy) looking like they’d had a new lease of life, which they had, of course.
There’s one young fella who’s going to supply the industry with a steady flow of business in years to come.
Pity about all the others.

Yes, yes, it’s true... back to the BBC for a third week in a row, but, look, somebody’s got to try and impress on these Auntie types that there are people reading this who are older than their beloved ‘Nawrthern Ahrland’.
Hot on the heels of BBC Ulster’s insipid Blueprint series - which appeared to suggest that the Craigavon roundabouts were from the Paleolithic period - comes an extraordinary BBC Radio Northern Ireland competition which aims to identify Our Wee Country’s foremost boffin.
It’s on David Dunseith’s Talk Back, which is normally something of a tranquil redoubt of accuracy and fairness in the sturm und drang of front line Ormeau Avenue.
But apparently they’ve lost the run of themselves too and have decided – a la Blueprint – to create their own history.
And so Talk Back has decreed that a piffling matter like the Act of Union of 1801 -which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland - doesn’t matter.

Inventors
Front-runners in the race to be what the BBC website calls ‘Northern Ireland’s most famous inventor’ are Harry Ferguson, who invented the tractor; Willie McCrum, who came up with the idea of the penalty kick in soccer; James Baker, who came up with jet plane ejector seat; and Frank Pantridge, who invented the portable defibrillator.
While the debate has raged hot and heavy, Squinter hates to be the one to point out the Emperor David is doing the show in the nip.
Take Ferguson, for instance, who was undoubtedly a giant in his, ah, field.
He was born in 1884 and first hitched a plough to a tractor unit in 1917.

Penalty kick
What any of that has to do with THP is anybody’s guess.
Then there’s McCrum, who first, um, pitched the idea of a penalty kick to the IFA in 1890, some time before David Healy rattled the winner in against England at Pairc Windsor.
How BBC Ulster have decided that this guy is a Northern Ireland inventor is beyond the (admittedly limited) comprehension of a bloke like Squinter.
The next two gentlemen were born in Ireland too, but at least their inventions postdated partition.
James Martin was born in 1893 – the first live test on his revolutionary new seat took place in 1946.
But the bloke legged it from Ireland to England in 1919 taking all his Irish and inventingness with him, but not his Northern Irishness; so while England has a bit of a stake in the matter as well as Ireland, it’s hard to see how he can be considered ‘Northern Ireland’s most famous inventor’.

Listen up
Frank Pantridge, somewhat embarrassingly for Talk Back, was born in 1916 when some of the events which would lead to the erection of the Harland & Wolff cranes were taking place 100 yards down the road (but not down the motorway, which goes to Dungannon, and which, like the portable defibrillator, wasn’t built for another 40 years and more anyway).
So while Frank was Irish by birth his invention belonged to the place and time of James Young, power station bombings, Teatime with Tommy, cinema pickets, breadservers, and all those other things that make your average Ulsterman’s heart soar.
So is Frank ‘Northern Ireland’s most famous inventor’?
Keep listening to Talk Back and find out.

We’ve all heard of three-litre barrackbuster of cider, but this is ridiculous…
Squinter is urged in an email to stick a bit in the paper asking people to nominate anyone they think is worthy of a prize in a sporting competition sponsored by the English brewing firm Thwaites.
The competition is called the Lancaster Bomber Grass Roots Sports Personality of the Year Award.
No, you’re not seeing things.
There is a sports competition called after the heavy bomber that created a deliberate firestorm in the city of Dresden in 1945, three months before the end of the war, that killed an estimated 40,000 innocent people.
If they’d keep that kind of thing confined to pubs in England where football fans still hum the Dambusters theme and pork scratchings and pickled eggs are on the menu, it would still be objectionable; but to attempt to export this madness across the Irish Sea is PR gone mad.
If indeed there is any other kind of PR.

Tip of the week: Write a letter to Northern Ireland Electricity and tell them you’re not known at the address they’re billing you at and that it’s your belief that the Dalai Lama is living there. You’ll get away with it, honestly.
Many are the stories that Squinter has heard about the mess that is NIE’s computerised billing system, but he never thought it was as bad as it actually is.
Recently the Roddy’s received a letter from NIE. Nothing strange about that, of course, except that the letter was addressed to The Occupier, Club House Bar, Glenn (sic) Road, Belfast. NIE write: “It has been drawn to my attention (exactly whose attention is not made clear as the letter is not signed) that representatives of Northern Ireland Electricity Plc have been unable to gain access to the above mentioned premises for the purpose of inspecting the meter installation.”
Well, of course NIE workers are going to have difficulty accessing the Club House because it closed 30 years ago. Quite why the letter ended up in the Roddy’s is not entirely clear as the club is some distance from the site of the old Club House.
“Accordingly I hereby give you notice for the purposes of the Electricity (NI) Order 1992 that Northern Ireland Electricity Plc will require access to the premises at a mutually convenient time.”
If they want access to the Club House that badly then Squinter can only suggest that they go to Milltown Cemetery or conduct a séance.

Spitting: A confession. Squinter does it, has done since he can’t remember when. It’s not big and it’s not clever but there you go.
Now don’t get Squinter wrong; he doesn’t spit in front of other people, he doesn’t spit on the pavement and he doesn’t do it as spectacularly or as regularly as footballers do. But he does it.
In all likelihood, Squinter picked it up from his da, who was a lorry driver and sometimes took the boy Squinter out for the day with him, mostly to pick up cargo from the docks, sometimes on the boat across to Britain.
Squinter’s da was a regular spitter, as were every one of his workmates, as indeed was just about everybody at the ports of Larne and Stranraer.
In fact, come to think of it, working class blokes were spitters to a man and it was no surprise that their working class sons were spitters too.
Whenever a gang of us would gather on a wall, we’d spend half our time talking and the other half spitting.

Spitter
Squinter doesn’t sit on walls much any more; he doesn’t spit that much any more; but he does it occasionally and – unlike those who smoke less than 40 a day, consider themselves ‘social’ smokers and tick the non-smoker box on the life insurance form – he’s not going to lie about it.
When he’s out walking up the mountains with the Irish Ramblers Association, or birdwatching on the banks of Lough Neagh with his pal Dúlra, Squinter will spit prodigiously.
But if he’s walking in a built-up area he’ll only do the occasional one when he thinks nobody’s looking, and then only on to the road or a piece of waste ground.
Even so, Squinter readily admits that it’s not nice.
It upsets a lot of people and it lacks class.
Squinter winces himself whenever he sees some burly bloke hock a loogy at the feet of anyone who happens to be passing.
But there’s no doubt that his moral authority is severely dented by the fact that he’s a spitter too.
When does Lent start?

What’s that they say about being in a hole and putting down your shovel?
As BBC This Here Pravince forges ahead with its new Blueprint series, a press release lands on Squinter’s desk with a satisfying thump (or rather, in his in-box with an apologetic beep).
On the front there’s a picture of presenter William Crawley standing heroically at the top of a hill flanked by a couple of archaeologists in obligatory fleeces.
Funny that, if we can digress a tad. Once upon a time experts on the Beeb wore blazers with hankies in the breast pocket and perhaps a monocle or a lorgnette.
Now they wear fleeces because nobody wants the Eastenders crowd who don’t like that university prof thing to switch off. Anyhoo, that press release…
At school Squinter was always taught that Ireland was partitioned in 1921 under the terms of the Government of Ireland Act (1920) and that the first Northern Ireland parliament was opened by King George V in June 1921.
Clearly, some people at the BBC were in bed sick the day that all came up in history class, as the opening paragraph of the press release suggests.
“The story of Northern Ireland’s remarkable journey through time concludes in the third programme of the landmark Blueprint series.
“This final programme chronicles the epic story of the people who have made Northern Ireland their home over the past 10,000 years, from our earliest ancestors to our recent European immigrants, and discovers how they made their mark on the landscape we know today.”
You can see the problem here, can’t you, even if the BBC can’t.
Northern Ireland’s “remarkable journey through time,” started eight decades ago, not eight millennia.
You’d think this might be just the right time for the BBC to refer to ‘the north’ of Ireland, but clearly that’s a bridge too far.
Even in 2008 Northern Ireland, the Province and Ulster are all permissible in the BBC style book, but for the BBC press office ‘the north’ remains outside the journalistic Pale.
You might not have heard of Mountsandel – Squinter certainly hadn’t.
It’s near Coleraine and, according to BBC Ulster, it’s where “evidence of the first humans in Northern Ireland” was found.
Of course, the first human beings in Northern Ireland didn’t live in circular huts, they didn’t wear animal skins and nor did they eat wild boar and hazelnuts.
They lived in terraced houses in the Pound Loney or the Shankill, they wore dunchers and pinafores and they ate porridge and stew; their chieftains lived in big houses in Co Down and ate kippers and pheasant.
It gets worse, unfortunately, it gets much worse.
A headline on page 4 of the press release reads: ‘Romans Once Had Plans to Invade Northern Ireland’.
Which means that Nero had something in common with Jack Lynch, which is going to prove quite a trivia teaser in the Roddy’s on Friday night.
Pity the Romans never made it as far as Our Wee Country.
Squinter seriously doubts if when they arrived in Hoc Provincio Minor they’d have decided to build the main road from Belfast to, ah, Dungannon.
They’d have done the right thing and gone straight to Dublinum.
And would they have allowed Our Wee Country to play their home qualifiers for the Known World Cup in Parcus Windsorius when they were used to holding their own grand events in the majestic Colosseum?
You have to doubt it.
Been interesting to read the report from the Legatus Legionis to the Emperor back in Rome…

Nostra Patria Minima, VII/XI/LXVI Salve Imperator Meus!
Arrived at last in Larnus after a choppy crossing of the Mare Hibernis.
Encountered a warlike band of Trevores Constabulares at the Terminus Stena who demanded that we produce our scriptum itineris.
They soon felt the keen cuspis of our gladii and we hoisted their heads high and took the AVIII dual carriageway southwards.
The wind from the north is decidedly frigus and the toga is here nowhere to be seen, instead a curious vestimentum ludus paying tribute to the Greek goddess Nike is the order of the day.
Sacrifices of young children are regularly made to canis diabolorum, the panting, slavering hound which is widely worshipped by the populus vulgus.
The streets of the larger towns are lined with infantiae ferae surrounded by XXIV-packs of alcopopae which they drink with even more delectatio than you, Imperator Caritas, put away the vinum that night last month in the bathhouse in Via Excessum.
We stopped our column to ask directions of these infantiae ferae and 12 legionnaires were stabbed, three centurions were badly beaten and we beat a hasty regressus.
As we marched deeper into the city, we encountered an Orgia Orangeus with much playing of music, wearing of funny clothes and cursing of Rome. We await your orders...

Some of us of a certain age (mesaproterozoic, somewhere in between the woolly mammoths, the cleaving of the ice shelves and the heyday of the Hole in the Wall Gang), will remember OMA. Others from the same era, people like Squinter, probably won’t because if they can’t remember where they left their car keys or the name of the bloke who presents the Late Late Show, how are they supposed to cast their minds back 40 years or more?
OMA? Got it? Yes? No? On the tip of the tongue?
In fact, OMA is ‘One Man Army’, otherwise known as the Johnny Seven, the most desirable and exciting toy ever to have been devised by the devilishly cunning minds of the evil geniuses of Madison Avenue.
The Johnny Seven was a multi-function machine gun with seven different actions (hence the Seven bit, not sure about the Johnny). 1968, the year before the guns in the street became real ones, and the insanely exciting TV ads for the toy induced in the boys of the lower Falls a mass psychotic episode of such intensely painful longing that a kind of torpor descended over the district and normally hyperactive male children fell into a bottomless pit of covetousness and frustration. We wandered the streets at a listless shuffle, talking in hushed tones about the limitless opportunities that would be afforded by ownership, about the life-changing prospect of some day walking those same streets as the Falls Road’s first OMA.
The memories came flooding back as Squinter clicked on an email from an old friend in London who pointed out that a pristine Johnny Seven, complete with original packaging and operating instructions, has just received a bid on ebay of £299.67. Squinter checked, as he always does. It’s true. Only these days ebay rules require the vendor to place an orange cap over the muzzle of the gun, which is surely worth an angry feature in the Daily Mail. Squinter’s pal sent a picture too, and blow Squinter down if those deliciously painful pangs of desire and yearning didn’t reach across the decades to grab him by the guts every bit as firmly as they did before his street went up in flames. Squinter and his pal exchanged a few stories, the most vividly remembered, for Squinter, was more of a confession…
Christmas morning 1968 and the boy Squinter and several other street urchins were comparing their meagre festive offerings. The Johnny Seven might not have cost £300 in 1968, but it was still beyond the range of every parent in the street. We wandered from Dover Street into Ardmoulin Avenue and there, standing in the middle of the road in order that everyone might better see, stood a boy brandishing a Johnny Seven – the first one any of us had seen in real life.
We walked slowly by, trying as best we could to hide our modest Christmas presents, and as we drew closer and it became apparent that the thing was even more desirable up close than it was on TV, curiosity was replaced by envy which quickly morphed into a deep sense of injustice which in seconds became burning anger.
We knew the boy with the Johnny Seven, although we weren’t friends. He hailed us warmly – too warmly of course, his sense of well-being heightened by his acute awareness of our utter misery. And then he opened fire on us. He opted for the grenade launcher, it being the largest and most visible option available to him. The green projectile traced what was, quite frankly, a disappointingly low and shallow parabola before bouncing a few feet in front of us and rolling into the gutter. Without thinking, Squinter picked it up and as the gunman stood watching, he hurled it as hard as he could over the roof of the nearest house. This time the grenade sailed high, clearing the roof and chimney and disappearing into the brick-walled yards at the back of the terrace. The sight of the boy’s open mouth briefly lifted Squinter’s spirits, but in an instant came the dread realisation that this was a lonely child who was in the habit of sharing things with his mother that most of us would have sorted out on the street.
And so it came to pass that, ten minutes later, Squinter was knocking on doors in Ardmoulin Avenue, his mother and the Johnny Seven mother standing on the pavement, arms folded and watching. The grenade wasn’t found by a householder until the third door had been rapped and as Squinter handed it back, it seemed as if all the sorrow and misery and pain in the world had risen into the chilly air and come to land on the skinny shoulders of a single boy on a Falls Christmas morning.
That was the only time in his life that Squinter ever touched a Johnny Seven – or, to be more accurate, part of a Johnny Seven. For one fleeting moment as he surveyed the ebay site, Squinter considered putting in a bid, but after five minutes of staring at the computer screen, the memory’s bitter tang had fermented into sweet nostalgia and with that change came the realisation that some things are best left alone.