Breaking the Seal
Being a Size 12/13 in a shoe size means that your choice of shoe is limited to whatever charitable slave-worker in the far east makes an oversized shoe that Nike decide to sell anyway, working men’s boots, or the sort of shoe that’s advertised in a black and white advert in the back page of the Sun, on alternate days between that and the Oreck Upright Wonder-Vacuum.
That’s not the worst of it. I have rather… ‘picky’ feet. When the other kids were wearing PU-Lined school shoes, at a tenner a throw - I had to stay with a full leather upper because the plastic made my feet sweat so bad, I wandered home from Middle School with Trench Foot. So I’ve always had to wear twice as expensive, leather coated shoes with decent support.
Sole Trader in Norwich used to sell Caterpillar brand shoes, (My regular reader may care enough to know that it was the Dominator range), which happened to go up to 14. Every year, I’d dash off to Norwich and get a new pair ordered in, and that was the total extent of my shoe-buying.
Then I moved to University where the Sole Trader was staffed by drooling morons. Who charged twice the price as in the Norwich store. Suddenly my £55 shoes were going for £130. So I switched to trainers, because Canterbury has a large Sports & Soccer with a large trainer section. I have bought comfortable trainers for the last three years at £13 a throw. My problems were solved.
Except I hate trainers. Always have, worse still, my toes are beginning to show the age-old symptom of overlong trainer use – they’re turning in toward each other.
For the last three months I’ve been on a quest to find new shoes. So off to Norwich I went. Sole Trader has now become ‘Sole’ (ZOLE if you read the font as if it was English, anyway), and has moved to trendy new Shopping centre Chapelfield full of people snorting Starbucks and lounging about in jeans so tight they might as well be a Ballet outfit.
It’s designed like a maze, faux-beech panels swoop in circles, creating a rounded maze, each with a separate genre of shoe. The dirty look from the haircut I got behind the counter suggested that I probably wasn’t welcome. The screams from the footwear on the shelves confirmed it – It was a cornucopia of Velcro trainers in leather, cowboy boots which slice your ankles off and shoes that taper to such a point you look like the court fucking jester.
I didn’t go back.
Today, two months later, I steeled myself for a second (and final) go. Any failure today and I’d be consigned to wear those retarded shoes from the back of the sun, trainers and of course, going barefoot.
My brain remembered something, half dead in the annals of time, that Clarks did a foot measuring service. Bending down and checking how bad my feet were baking in the summer sun (I’d showered, but still, it was very hot today). I thought I’d go in, and if there wasn’t anything in a decent size and price, I’d demand to have my foot seen to by the greatest foot-mind in the store.
On the way in, lying teasingly on the specials rail (End of line, £30 off!) I noticed a well-made pair of brown brogues. I had seen my Cousion-in-law (and former colleague) wearing a pair of Brown shoes, and imaging them to be the new en-vogue I examined them further. Weirdly, they had similar tailoring to the old Caterpillars, and as opposed to the usual Moccasin style that Clarks make so well (and so awfully, who in their right mind would wear a pair of shoes that make you look as if you’re wearing a pair of rain bowls stitched by a 12 year old?). They were also, Size 11. I assume the sun had boiled part of my brain, the part that understands that 11 is TWO SIZES BELOW 13. So LIKE A MENTALIST I tried them on.
And they fit.
The bastards actually fit! Once you were past the threshold, they were comfortable as gloves! Oh sweet lord, they were amazing. They fit me, actual shoes that fit me, the joy of the moment is impossible to explain in prose.
But then horror. I, Me? Couldn’t certainly pull off brown shoes? I’m barely capable of communicating things in words and sentences, let alone brown shoes!
The shoes were on the specials rail, which meant that there wasn’t any chance of there being different sizes or anything else for that matter. Well, I’d not come this far without exhausting all of my options, so damnit, after perusing the handbags for a while (I’d thought there was men’s shoes in that asile too, and I couldn’t just wheel round – it’d have made me look like a fool), I stomped up to a guy and asked.
A second later he produced a pair of black shoes, same style, last pair in the store, size 11. On they went, and aside from tightness in the heel, they were wonderful. So I wore them for the rest of the day. (Yes, my heels are sore from the rubbing, No, I don’t care).
Joyfully, I have broken the shoe-seal, and I can’t say I’m anything other than happy.
And yes. I am the sort of person who would prefer to stare at a wall of handbags instead of making it look like I made a mistake.
