I still just love those shoes where you buy a pair, and then someone somewhere who can’t afford shoes gets a pair too. Win-win : )

I hope it’s sustainable though. If their margins aren’t high enough, there won’t be any more shoes for poor people, and that would be a terrible shame. Maybe they would have to change the system, so that each time they sell a pair, the poor person gets just one shoe, either the left or the right, and then has to wait for another sale to be made to get a shoe for the other foot. Then there would be an administrative problem though, and they would have to spend more money, hiring people to keep track of which shoe the poor person still needed. God, I hope they have thought this through.

I wish Prada would do something like that because that’s where I mainly like to get my shoes from. I guess that if they did, they couldn’t afford to have such nice stuff because they couldn’t pay the designers enough to make it worth their while.

When Max got home from school today I had to take him to buy a present for his little friend’s birthday at the weekend. He was quite tired because he has mandarin after school on Thursdays (one hour a day as part of the curriculum just isn’t enough; 6-year old brain cells grow at the speed of light, and we have to get that Chinese in there asap because our children absolutely must learn the language to compete in this global economy), so I decided to go to the Toys R Us which is 5 minutes’ walk away, instead of the slightly bigger one which takes 7 minutes to get to, or the really huge one which is a 12 minute walk.

Bless him, Max was feeling a bit sad. He was talking about how much he misses his big cousins back home, and that he wishes he could see them more often so that they could help him get to the next level on Minecraft. So sad, poor thing. I hate it when he says he wants to go home.

When we were choosing the present, he wanted to get the same thing for himself. First I thought, ok that’s not a good habit to get into; but then he got all sad again about wanting to go home, and asked why we’re here anyway when all our family are somewhere else and we have a perfectly nice house in London.

It is just so hard to be an expat kid, I suppose. So I bought him the toy, but I got him the bigger, more expensive version of the one we got for his friend (the friend will never know). He’s in his room now with the helper, playing fighting games with the new toy, and he seems much happier than he was earlier. No mention of going home at all!