Shoes

I discussed trousers last time; my biggest problem in finding something to fit.​

​Shoes come next.

​Again I'm quite lucky.  My feet stopped growing at size 12, which is big enough to send some retailers into a spin, but is by no means out of the ordinary.  If you have shoe sizes 13, 14, 15 or bigger you have my sympathy.

​There was a time when even size 12 feet would elicit horrified shrieks or at least amused smirks from the average shoe shop staffer.  Might as well have been looking for clowns feet.  I remember a particularly fruitless search in the mid '80s for a pair of smart black shoes; not, you might have thought, an especially unusual ask.  I eventually found a pair in the umpteenth shop that were not especially stylish but at least fitted and following the trauma of this event did not shop again for black shoes for at least half a decade.

​As with jeans in the trouser department, the light relief in the shoe shop came in the form of trainers.  For reasons that escaped me then and pretty much still do, it seemed perfectly normal for a person to want a larger training shoe but not any other foot covering.  I lived in trainers for a long time; very comfy they were too, though not especially stylish.  Socks were also a problem, until Marks and Spencer started to stock ​them in larger sizes.  I wore a lot of towelling socks with my trainers, since they seemed particularly stretchy.

​Again the 1990s started to bring relief for the size 12 shoe wearer, until what I shall describe as the Great European Shoe Size Disaster.

I am not one of those people who get worked up about all things European.  I may still think in terms of feet, pounds and pints, but that's more to do with my age than any metric phobia.  It's not that I'm all that old, but I was part of the last generation that didn't start out metric and the imperial measures stuck.  But I have at worst a fairly neutral view towards the European Union except in this one matter.

It turned out that our imperial shoe sizes were slightly out of step with the European ones.  Rather than live with the ambiguity, someone decided that we needed to have Pan-European manufacturing.  The shoes were labelled with the European size and the nearest UK equivalent.  Perhaps most of you missed this pivotal moment.  Maybe your size coincided quite well with its Euro neighbour.  Not so for size 12, which was paired up with European size 46.  A calamity, since 46 was at absolute best about 11 and a half.  47 on the other hand was an excellent fit for me.  But those shops that had decided that 12 was the top of the tree for them would stock to 46 and no further, meaning another barren spell for me.

Whe​ther this elicited an outcry, or whether the shoe retailers gradually sized up, 47 became more widely available over time and now seems fairly well entrenched.  But I can't see a 46 shoe to this day without a shudder.

Things to wear

​I'm quite lucky in that I'm only just outside the bounds of normality as perceived by clothing manufacturers.  Which is to say that most of what is on offer is no use to me, but I can still find clothes to fit in at least some mainstream stores.​

​My most awkward feature is the length of my legs.  I'll almost certainly come back to this another time, but in this context it makes it hard for me to find trousers that are long enough.  This was a huge problem when I was growing up in the 1980's, but I was saved by the sudden popularity of turned up trousers.  I could get the turn-ups turned down and sometimes even unpick the seams and drop them down further still, giving me generally a couple of extra inches or so.  This wasn't always easy to achieve and I am no kind of a seamster, but I had a mother with a sewing machine.

​Jeans were always easier to get hold of at decent length; at least they were quite difficult to get hold of, but not as difficult as any other kind of trouser.  Fortunately, for a while I was a student and had little cause to wear anything else.

​Then in the 90's things started to get less tricky.  It seemed like the retailers had cottoned on that there was a market for the taller person which was ill served (I may discuss the experience of using shops like High and Mighty another time).  New retailers like Gap came to the UK with their existing range of bigger sizes, and there were mail order outlets too.  Even Marks and Spencer started stocking longer trousers .  For a short while I felt fairly normal.

​Subsequently I ran into a couple of problems.  First I got a bit fatter in my 30s and could not so easily find a good fit.  It seemed like you could get a good fit if you were thin and tall or short and fat, but not tall and a bit overweight.  It never became impossible, but it was harder to find what I wanted.

More significantly, the financial pressures of the last few years seem to have led retailers to cut back on their stockholding.  Clothes for tall people must be pretty hard to shift compared with those for a more average size and so it has become almost impossible again to wander in off the street and find something to fit.  Fortunately it's not so bad on line, though clothes shopping on line isn't the best.

This entry is starting to get epic in size, so I'll pause for now ​and come back on this topic shortly.

You've grown!

Most people will have experienced one flavour of this ​scenario in their youth, as a Granny or Great Aunt on seeing them for the first time in a while says, "Haven't you grown!" Cue embarrassment for the child and amusement for everyone else. This is mainly predicated on the aged relative having a mental picture of the child from the last time she saw them and a surprise that things have moved on in the interim.  Meanwhile from the child's perspective they have hardly changed at all from day to day and they can't understand what the fuss is all about.

​I experience something of the same response from time to time, but for different reasons.  Quite frequently someone will ask me, particularly on meeting me for the first time in a while "Have you grown?". No, I haven't. Not since about 1986. But that person is still suffering some sense of dislocation between their mental image of me and the person they see in front of them.

​Why is this? I clearly haven't grown and they know that really. But despite me being no taller now then when they last saw me, it's as if  I've somehow shrunk in their memory.

Did I fail to make an impression of utter hugeness at the time? That seems unlikely, because if I seem big now, I probably looked the same the first time.

Is this a strange trick of the memory? The longer in between sightings, the brain says "He can't really be that tall! Make the memory a bit smaller." Does the memory of something tend to decay towards the average over time?

Perhaps when you get to know me I stop being just a very large person and become your friend.  So you stop noticing so much the ​enormousness and get on with the normal things.  And the fact that I'm tall gets suppressed and only comes out again when you see me after a while and it's a surprise again.

Whatever the reason​, it doesn't last long. No-one has ever been surprised by my height halfway through a conversation. However extreme the reaction at first, it seem to pass pretty quickly.

This is good.  I don't think I could cope with being much more conspicuous.​

Why "A Big Lad"

I am quite big - not just tall.  In fact that may be one of the reasons why people seem to forget quite how tall I am between times that they meet me (more of that later too).   I look pretty much like an average person but a bit bigger in each dimension.

owever the real reason for "A Big Lad" is football commentary in the late '80s and early '90s on ITV.  It seemed to astonish the pundits that any footballer taller than about 5 feet 8 could actually play. I'll talk about this some more another time, but for now let's just say that this is a sport in which Ron Atkinson could be called "Big Ron".

It would reach extreme heights whenever Arsenal were playing and Niall Quinn appeared.  You would think that here was an unparalleled giant of a man on the pitch to hear the likes of Jack Charlton.  "He's a big lad!" would be his usual statement of the obvious as he marvelled at Quinn's ability to stand on his feet for even a few seconds.  His colleague would concur, before dwelling on something equally transparent.

Yes, it was definitely Jack's north-east tones I could hear in my head s I named my blog "A Big Lad".

f Niall Quinn qualifies as a big lad, I certainly do. may not have any footballing skill whatsoever, but I am a little taller (and fatter).

How big is big?

As I mentioned elsewhere, I'm a little over 6 feet 5 inches.  That's quite a long way short of 8 feet 11 inches, the tallest height recorded for a man (Robert Pershing Wadlow for fact fans).

It's not even much good for basketball. In a shortlived period on the '80s, Channel 4 showed UK basketball matches live on a Monday evening.  The best team at the time were the Solent Stars and their captain was called Karl Tatham.  He was about 6 feet 5 and looked kind of short on a basketball court, especially beside the 6 feet 10 Mark Saiers.

So am I even qualified to talk about being tall?

​According to some stats I found on a web search, so treat them as sceptically as you wish, average UK adult male height is 69.3” (just a smidge over 5 feet 9).  furthermore the standard deviation is 2.8”.  Don't worry - it's not getting much more stats heavy than this.  This means that 3 standard deviations from the midpoint is 77.7”, and thus about 1 in 700 men in the UK will be taller than me (and, no doubt, a few women too).

Given that 700 is a reasonably large number of people, if you know me I am probably the ​tallest person you know; at least the tallest you know well.  (I am not, however, the tallest person I know, of which more later.)

So I think that still gives me some legitimacy in talking about height and its quirks, even if I am a bit of a shorty as far as extremes of height go.​