my house: To Sell or Not to Sell...?

Tower of heels, fare ye well.

There is a cupboard in our house that requires a ladder to access it. It houses a dusty pile of shoe boxes, bursting with vertigionously high heels in a rainbow of colours and styles; part of those glamorous twenty-something years where I needed little excuse to turn from a grimy trainer to a heel as the evening approached. Now it is from a trainer to a slipper (and not the silky heeled type, much loved by ageing movie stars). So, with some hesitation, I have just scaled the precarious shelves beneath the shoe shop cupboard (to get the ladder would mean fighting my way through the booby trapped dump that is our cellar) and unearthed some beautiful shoes that haven't seen the light of day - or a disco ball - for an awfully long time.
There is something rather sad about boxed up shoes, at least when they have been tucked away for at least half a decade. Heels, whether you wear them or not symbolise a 'good time', practicalities are not of consequence, strap them to your feet and you become a party warrior, any pain being numbed by the swig of another alcoholic beverage. But that me is a distant past that I only occasionally revisit and with no daughters on whom I can dump my ton of shoes I have taken the long overdue decision to 'get rid'.
Ebay was my first call, the computer land of buy and sell where anything is up for grabs. You want a cashew shaped like Jesus' face? Or a date with someones' gay Uncle Frank? Okey, surely there must be a few willing buyers for some very desirable, clicky heeled things that have fancy names on them and once robbed me of all my earnings? Let me just read the blurb. Yep. Yep. Yep. Got it. ERRRGGHHHHHHHHhhhhhh...... Something tells me I have been here before. I have attempted this whole charade with some other bits of nonsense I've thought fit to sell. What happened? Oh yes, I went "ERRRGGHHHHHHHHhhhhhh......" Why? Because it is so emotionless and well, professional. Most people selling have clearly made it their daily grind. They have ratings and reviews. They have a patter of writing and loads of products. They most likely have jiffy bags aplenty and industrial brown tape for sealing up goods. And even after all of that, their sales never really shift for much more than the cost of post and packaging. But my handicap is the emotional attachment I have over those shoes and although I should just shut-up and get on with it I have another option.
Strut, a great shop, local to me in N16, is an Aladdins' cave of vintage clothes, that also buys up the kind of clobber that lives in my unreachable cupboard. Here, the shoes would be displayed, admired and maybe sold! to a young, life-loving thing, whose only responsibility is to scrape enough money out of the shopping left-overs to pay her rent. (I'm getting a bit rose-tinted nostalgic here.) So Asa and I are going to eat our boiled egg and soldiers now and then we're off to our first sales meeting. I'll do the talking and he can model the goods. He's got the legs for it.