First Customer
‘Shine my boots, slave!’
‘Yes, customer-mistress Ms Karen Madam. At once, customer-mistress Ms Karen Madam.’
My first customer of the day is a familiar pair of boots – the smart, black leather ankleboots of local businesswoman-mistress Ms Karen Madam. As I lickshine the exterior of her right boot I notice, high above my humble head, and thanks to a kink in her smart, grey, business suit trouser-hem, the white, elasticated top of an otherwise black cotton bootsock.
It is a magnificent sock, and I am sorely tempted to tell Ms Karen madam so, except that I know her, and taciturn Ms Karen is not the sort of customer-mistress with whom it is wise to initiate a conversation about her socks. She might take it the wrong way – especially when, as now, she appears to be in a sullen mood. And so I bite my tongue, and refrain from telling her that her black and white socks are my life, and that I shall be thinking about them on her feet inside her boots for the rest of the day!
I’m not exaggerating when I say (or rather think) that. No matter how many nice pairs of socks I may see today as I go about my humble, daily business of lickshining the public’s footwear, Ms Karen’s classy black and white cotton bootsocks shall linger on my menial mind as they are the socks of a businesswoman-goddess who is so high above me on the Gynarchy social scale that she can’t even bring herself to speak to me – other than to dismissively snap down her female command at me to ‘shine her boots’.
And rightly so.
