If a man wearing a suit and canvas oxfords jaywalks, how many crimes is he committing?

I am still going a bit mental about shoes - and I plan to write yet another post after this one to show off how much I've learned - but I think I may have found a pair to wear, or at least narrowed the choice down.

While I have been quite taken with the idea of spending a small fortune on an exceptionally well-made hand-made pair that should, hopefully, then last me the rest of my life with a few re-solings here and there, it's still perilously expensive for our tight wedding budget. Sure, the idea of minimising waste, never needing to throw an old pair of shoes away again, is appealing - go environment! - and, just as importantly, significantly reducing the time spent trying on shoes in snooty stores, for the remainder of my limited lifespan, will be something to brag about.

Imagine that! When I'm older, I can say with justification that I will have lived an extra 17 months or something compared to other schmucks who kept shoe-shopping past their late twenties. Yep, I reckon I will even do proper maths to work out how many days I have saved for activities other than staring at my feet in small, slanted mirrors.

Nevertheless, I imagine I'd be pretty miffed if I attended a friend's wedding and was told that there were not enough chairs for everybody to sit down, or we'd all have to share a meal and cut back on drink, because the groom wanted to buy some fancy shoes. In my wedding hierarchy of needs, I place booze above shoes.

But hark! Salvation is at hand. There's a shoe store in Perth that I'd never gone into until yesterday. It's called Ginger's for Gentlemen, so you can see why I didn't bother going in. One could reasonably expect the shoes to all be feisty weirdoes with freckles instead of broguing. As usual, however, discrimination is wrong in both meanings of the word. I went in in desperation. I came out impressed. I'll need to aks the attendant, or do more internet research, but I think they also stock and create shoes that are able to be resoled over a lifetime. Buying my shoes at a local Perth store gives a nice feeling, too, not least because I will be able to try the shoes on before I buy them to make sure they fit. (Come on internet, where's my app for that? Your excellent prices will only go so far.) They are having a sale at the moment, too. Serendipity, much?

Now I just have to pick which black oxfords in store to buy. Am I deluding myself by considering the following as potentials?

The style is right - they are back oxfords. Well, I wanted captoes, but I can let that slide.

The price is right - they are not 600 pounds.

The material is questionable. They're canvas, which is vegan, so I have consistency of opinion, which is nice, but I have also since read that dress shoes simply must be leather. How much of a faux pas it it, really?

Is it terribly dreadful, like leaving the label of a suit's designer/manufacturer showing on your sleeve cuff, or is it one of those stupid 'rules' like "Never start a sentence with the word because", which aren't even rules at all, just asinine trite tripe trotted out by well-meaning high school teachers who don't know any better. Because of 'rules' such as that, the art of skilled rhetoric has been set back a bazillion years! (Hyperbole has, luckily, escaped this fate.)

I'm just not sure at the moment. Ginger's does have leather oxfords, too, which are more expensive but still reasonable, and a choice of a brogue captoe, so I will be fine no matter what I decide.

... so long as they don't sell out of my size while I dither about....