My Left Foot and Other Festive Tales

December 29, 2024, 9:54 am , by Richard Lutz

Richard Lutz enjoys Christmas

A couple of months ago, I simply bought the wrong shoes. The right one was OK. But the other never really fit and that’s because my left foot has always been a pain in the….well….foot.

First of all, it’s a half-size smaller than the right foot. Secondly, its arch contracts and goes into spasms and ends up feeling like a block of cement and thirdly, it’s just a stupid problem.

When I realise I goofed again by shelling out more money for a pair of duff running shoes to get me around, I decided to wait for the post-Christmas sales and yesterday dived into my local shoe palace to buy a replacement pair that actually does the business. And they do. A small victory for not only mankind and the foot apparel industry but also my ability to walk around. Plus, gleefully, there was a 30% price reduction.

CRIMBO LIMBO

This dramatic victory is but a small sub-chapter about what in the UK is called Crimbo Limbo- that neverland between Christmas and New Year’s Day. It is usually filled with suspect weather, remains of big meals (a certain quantity of which has its health constraints) and dubious entertainment on tv and onstage.

Our limboland, though, was decorated with a small success: our family team won a quiz night. We knew the capital of Albania, the last names of the stars of a reality tv show and the inevitable question about an American President. We won by a mere two points and, this being Scotland, were awarded with another mountain of chocolate.

The only downside was that we had hit upon a very funny name for our (winning) team. Sadly, we were simply allocated the title Team Number Two which lacked, we thought, the eclat and style of a catchy knowing name. That’s the luck and vicissitudes of Crimbo Limbo, I guess.

Later, I use my New Shoes to glide…and my feet do glide with the new purchase as I feel as if I’m bouncing on air down winter streets… to a Crimbo Limbo festival at the quirky Glasgow Film Theatre.

It’s a 30 year old movie called Smoke starring Harvey Keitel as a philosophical cigar store owner in the depths of Brooklyn and Forest Whitaker as a man with a testy paternal past. It’s a gem.

And maybe it should be as it’s written by the late Paul Auster, a writer so adept it leaves us all with differing ideas about how the story ends. Was the main character (Keitel) making up a little tale of human kindness? Or did it actually happen? Did the endearing black and white final sequence reveal that it was all true or was it a re-creation of a cheeky imagination? Was Keitel’s character ‘a master of bullshit’ as a pal calls him? Or was he just a good guy?

Poignantly, exterior shots portray a lower Manhattan skyline that includes the World Trade Towers before they were destroyed.

How a film dates can sometimes be portrayed so unknowingly by a specific image….of a public phonebox being used on a street corner, someone pounding a typewriter (as in Smoke), folks lighting a cigarette in a restaurant or a gigantic structure like the towers still pointing to the New York sky 30 years ago, before the bombing when the moviegoer, the actors, Paul Auster, me, you, the fictional characters never conceived of such a disaster.