Are you ready boots

Maggie Alderson
”Are You Ready, Boots?” 2007

Are You Ready Boots is a short story about an English girl called Lulu and her black leather boots.
The story begins in New York where Lulu, her good pal Spencer and another freind are on a four day trip. On a shoe sale she finds these marvellous boots that makes her feel fantastic, and she buys them. When shes back in England she can't bear to wear them bacause they were so expensive. Until one night six month later when she's going out with Spencer and he encourages her to wear them. She does, and that night she meets a very handsome man called Charlie. After a while she walks straight to him (in her boots), talks with him, and she ends up with dating him. They become lovers and he seems to be the ”perfect” man.
Only Spencer disapproves their relationship. After a while Charlie proposes and she accepts.
The same night she decides to wear the same dress, including the boots, as the day the met.
But then Charlie says that he hates the boots and he asks her to take them off.
Then she looks at her great boots, makes a decision and leaves...

The main character is a woman called Lulu. I think she might be in the twenties because she's old enough to gets married and young enough to go out and get drunk with her freinds.
She lives in England, and she seems to be like a typical city girl who likes shopping, going out with freinds and so on. She may be a little upper class for example bacause she drinks champagne when she's going out, but still she's not like a real richie, because of the way she's ashamed of the price of the boots and how she's very impressed of Charlie's Porsche.
It also confirms my feeling of Lulu as a girl who likes the ”wealthy feeling” and that is also the reason that she in the beginning buys the boots even though they are too expensive.
This leads to another of Lulu's traits; that she's pretty conscious about the way she looks, and others looks. When she finally takes courage to talk with Charlie for the first time, she's sure that it's because of the boots – she finds self-confidence in material things like the expensive boots.
It's also notable how much of the text that the description of the boots and her thoughts about them fills. As well as the descriptions of Charlie's handsome look is described a lot of times.

I think she's typical young and modern woman who likes a lot of ”normal” things. The way she doesn't sees ”the real” Charlie for such a long time, do I interpret as some kind of desperation sign.
If she's in the late twenties many of her freinds may have found their one and only and I think that many singles a feeling a pressure (line 90. ”I really had a boyfreind”). Nobody wants to be the lonely old maid, when their freinds become parents and so on...

Two men have important roles in the story: Lulu's good pal Spencer and Charlie who becomes her boyfreind.
Spencer is like a real freind who takes her out for fun, who worries about her and I think that he knows her very well. He is with her in New York when she buys the boots and he is the one who tells her his actual opinion about Lulu and Charlie's releationship. At first she doesn't wants to listen to him, but she can't just forgets what he said which shows us that she normally listens to Spencer's opinions. And in the end it's also like his the one who's proved right.

Charlie is a totally different kind of man. He is not spontaneous funny like Spencer is – in fact I don't think he's spontaneous at all (or funny).
But he walks straight in to Lulu's life, at a point when I think she needs a man. He's very good looking, seems to be the perfect man and Lulu is flattered because of the way he for example always remembers to call her. Her love for this man is not described anywhere in the text and it's tempting to doubt that she actually never loved him..

Fundamentally I don't think that you should judge people's choices of clothes because you should be allowed to wear what ever you want to. But it is not always possible to escape if people ask you directly what you think of this and that- which girl freinds often do.
And in such a situation I think that the only right thing to do is to tell the truth. But I still think that the whole truth may be a little too hard sometimes. And then it's okay to tell a tiny little lie.
But there are cases where it's the best to tell the hard truth to kind of prepare the person you are talking with, bacause you can see that if you don't say anything other people, and maybe strangers, will do and that's a lot worse.
So to what extent it is okay to judge depends on the situation, how close you are to the person you are judging and how ”necessary” the judgement is.