As you may remember, I recently ordered my first made-to-measure shirt and I was very impressed with the speed of delivery by MTM Shirt. Considering it was made to order in Russia and delivered to New York, 12 days is quite impressive.

As I described in my last post on shirts, my ‘fuller’ neck means that I complain about ballooning chests and simian length arms when I buy off the peg. So, how does the blue made-to-measure shirt compare?

Well, the arms were the biggest success. The sleeves are much more fitted around my forearms and are even better on the upper arms. The length of the sleeve is a vast improvement on the pink shirt pictured (a shirt typical of my off the peg experience), but may still be a little long.

My only complaint with the sleeve is very slight, but it is rather annoying. The button holes on the cuffs are tiny. They are far too tight for any of my cufflinks, which resulted in a five minute struggle to fasten them. The embroidered initials are rather large too, but they were always going to be a little ostentatious.

The shoulders are perfect. There is little else to say on the matter and the chest is almost there too. I may be tempted for another centimetre or two if I order again, but that may be because I am used to having oceans of material in that area. (This is akin to a common complaint when people first get bespoke shoes and have worn the wrong size for years. You get comfortable, even if it is wrong.)

My major complaint is the hip measurement. As the photo of the blue shirt shows, the bottom button is rather snug.

All in all, I am pretty pleased with the result. I never expected the process to be perfect and I have learned a few areas of improvement in my measuring for when I order in the future. A couple of centimetres here and there and the results will be worth the extra money.

That said, I was a little disappointed with the material. It is a little rougher than I like for a shirt. Yes, that may make me a tender little flower, but it emphasises the fact that it is hard to determine texture from a photo on a website.

Finally, apologies for my gurning face in the photos. I may have had a few drinks before the photos…

One of my friends has a theory that it is the bottom of a well made men’s shoe that shows the quality of the purchase. He believes that the detail on the waist and the fully leather sole reveals more to the average eye than the finely buffed uppers.

As a result, he likes to sit with his legs crossed and one sole showing whenever he can. This has the added benefit of revealing that he has thought about the colour of his socks too. He tends to do this more around female company too, but I’m not sure his results are quantifiable.

I find the whole thing a bit ridiculous. I am not self conscious enough to change the way I sit just to show off the bottom of my shoes in the hope that someone will notice them. Plus, I’ve always found that people notice good shoes from the uppers if they are polished well.

But the beggar got me thinking about the soles of my shoes. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t be changing my gait to avoid marking my soles at all. However, I am getting a little obsessed about the waist of my shoes (the bit that angles down from the top of the heel stack to the point where the sole begins to touch the floor).

My friend advised me to clean the waist and even to polish it every so often. On a few pairs of my shoes, there is an interesting design element on the waist. Be that a different colour of leather or hand bunking by a fancy wheel. So I could see a benefit to the twisted logic of polishing the underside of a pair of shoes.

But this advice has helped speed up my rapid descent into obsessive polishing. It has also changed the way that I walk up and down stairs. I am worried about scuffing the waist, so I end up trying to place my whole foot on a step or just enough of the toe and ball of my foot to avoid the waist.

As a result, I look like I have never encountered a staircase before. My friend’s obsession with the soles of his shoes is designed to attract conversation. My manifestation of the obsession means that people avoid me because I look mentally ill when I enter a subway station.

The resilience of leather never ceases to amaze me and a recent business trip to Montreal put this to the test.

After the strangest flight I have ever been on (who would have thought a lawnmower engine could keep a passenger plane in the air?), I arrived at my hotel and unpacked my bag. I had very little planned in the evening, so was intending to polish my shoes while exploring Canadian television.

I grabbed my shoe kit and took out the polish, the cream and the toothbrush for the welt. But I’d forgotten my brushes and sylvette. I was very disappointed with myself. So I went on the hunt for a something cotton that I could use instead. After several fruitless minutes, I gave up and went for dinner.

Later that evening, I was a bit bored by the amount of French shows on the box and found myself reading the hotel information. To my utter joy (yes, I was that bored), there was a free shoe shine service. So I popped my shoes into the plastic bag I found in the wardrobe and hung them outside my door.

The next morning, they were back outside my room and barely looked polished at all. Indeed, if anything, it looked like they had been given a quick once-over with a brush that had been used for black shoes. I returned to being annoyed at myself for travelling with an incomplete shoe kit.

The day went from bad to worse with regard to the shoes. First, it rained heavily. Then I missed my step in a pedestrian area and scraped the outside back of my heel cup on a curbstone. Finally, I got home and realised that I had also forgotten my shoe trees. So I had wet, scratched shoes with no way to support their shape or polish them properly.

My final error was to pack the shoes in my suitcase for the return journey instead of wearing them. Without shoe trees, they took a bit of a beating from the luggage handlers at La Guardia. I’ve never seen them in such bad shape and I was ashamed of myself.

As soon as I got home, I whipped out the polish and cream and gave them all the love and attention that I had time for. The next day, I swung by my favourite shoe shine stall in New York: the one in the dining hall at Grand Central station.

Ten minutes and a hefty tip later and my mid brown cap-toes were back to their best.

Nothing remarkable in that you may think, except this whisky is whiskey, rye whiskey in fact, and it’s nearly 150 years old.

So what is it? How did it survive? And what on earth does it taste like? (And, perhaps, where can I get some?)

What I’m drinking is from the ‘Hannisville Cache’ – a small parcel of rye whiskey distilled around 1863 by Hannis Distilling of Philadelphia. That company survived until around 1919 (there’s more about them here).

Rye whiskey is the original American style. Right now it’s undergoing a modest revival, having been nearly wiped out by a combination of prohibition and Bourbon’s post-War popularity. But innovative small craft distillers have reinvigorated a great craft distilling tradition and once again rye whiskey is relatively available.

But back to my glass. The Hannisville Cache comprises several carboys of rye, bourbon and gin that were found by the redoubtable David Nathan-Maister of Finest & Rarest, who makes it his life’s mission to discover rare, unusual and lost distilling gems.

In this case, the rye whiskey was believed to have been distilled around 1863 and held in oak casks for some 50 years. In 1913 the casks were purchased by a John Welsh of Philadelphia, formerly US ambassador to the UK. He had the spirit transferred into glass carboys and stored by the Merchants Cold Storage and Warehouse Co of Providence, RI. There it lay undisturbed for virtually a century. Once in glass, spirits don’t age, but they don’t noticeably deteriorate either, making this an exceptional time capsule for vintage spirits enthusiasts.

It passed through the family until purchased by Fine & Rarest last year. They have transferred the two carboys of rye (and some gin) into 200 ml sample flasks (around a quarter of a normal bottle) which you can find on their website at www.finestandrarest.com

The first impression on the nose is of overwhelming vanilla, then very ripe bananas. The aromas are sweet and heavy, very complex and constantly evolving. But they’re deceptive – in the mouth the whiskey is quite drying; it’s oily (that’s good), with dark orange notes and rich spices. It lasts a very long time in the finish and unusually for a very old spirit the taste profile hangs together with the addition of a little water, releasing mint and herbal notes (ginger and liquorice are evident).

It’s not the greatest whiskey I’ve ever tasted, but it’s probably the most memorable. It’s an incredible and probably unrepeatable experience to drink any spirit of this age and I’m quite emotional as each drop passes my lips.

Ian Buxton

For SS11 I wanted a special new light colourway from our Italian factory. Their beautiful hand-painted leather technique works brilliantly for rich, multi- layered dark colours; but I wanted to see how close to the natural organic crust leather we could go without the hue looking bland.

They work with a very light crust leather that is untreated and without any ‘character.’ Our initial attempts at creating a bone colour with minimal application of staining or coloured wax were disappointing. The initial colour sample came in looking dull. We’d decided to just seal the leather with a clear coat of wax; and no more….and the result wasn’t good!

Here you can see on the right; our ‘Rum’ colour created from multiple layers of tans and browns; and on the left the pure sealed crust leather. In comparison the crust looks drab and unappealing.

So…we experimented with applying very small amounts of a grey and mid-tan mix to the contours of the shoe, highlighting areas of interest such as the toe and topline. The main body of the shoe was given a light semi-opaque tan wash…and suddenly the style came to life.

After an intense clear-wax buff, the antique ivory colour was sealed, although over time will deepen and develop more character.

This beautiful new Bone colourway will be available as part of the SS11 collection, in two Italian styles. We love it!

Only a couple of weeks after getting over my shoe paranoia, my new theory of wearing them at the first opportunity to get it out of the way was scuppered. I was eagerly opening the box containing my fresh chestnut wingtips and it dawned on me… They were going to need a good polish before I could wear them.

My well-dressed, cross-Atlantic delivery man confirmed it. “You’ll need to given the whole shoe a layer or two of darker polish all over, slightly more around the heel and as many layers as you can be bothered to do on the toe,” he said. “You have to develop your own patina.”

Gah! I had planned to wear them the next day, but he was right. The light coloured leather looked much rawer than the pictures on the website. The shoes, dare I say it, looked almost plastic coated. As regular readers know, I am relatively new to the higher end of the shoe market and these are the first pair of light-coloured leather shoes I have ever owned.

That evening, I sat down to listen to the Answer Me This podcast and cracked open my tin of dark tan Kiwi shoe polish. With a little bit of anxiety about my choice of colour, I started building up the layers of polish using the water in the tin lid technique.

And my use of that technique was put to the test on the lighter leather. I had to concentrate even more on the even distribution of polish. A couple of times I accidentally put too much on and I recoiled with horror as I thought I had ruined certain areas. But with patience, I corrected any mistakes with extra water or putting more polish elsewhere to even it up.

(I particularly struggled with the area at the top of the shoe, near the lacing. Perhaps the leather has been treated differently there? Or the grain is facing a different way? I’ll report back if this isn’t just a figment of my imagination.)

I spent a good 40 minutes or so on the toe alone and I lost count of the layers I put on. However, I am really pleased with the results. My ‘point-and-shoot’ camera doesn’t do them justice, but I did one shoe first so that you could see the before and after.

Before I forget, does any one have any tips on the thin area just at the bottom of the uppers? Where the shoe nips in and it is hard to get the sylvette in to polish properly? It isn’t that noticeable, but up close I have a thin strip of lighter leather running around the edge of the shoe and it is driving me mad! No one else will see it, but I know it’s there…