There’s something about a pair of shoes. A really good, well-made pair of shoes. Shoes that, when you put them on in the shop, draw from your feet a sound of quiet ecstasy, a hedonistic purr of pleasure. ‘Oooohhhh yes. Come to papa.’
I’ve learned not to be seduced by looks. I fell in love with a pair once, many years ago. I was, inevitably, in Italy. They were slick, stylish, ox-blood red, elegantly tapering to the toe without being ‘bloke standing behind Joe Pesci in Goodfellas’ pointy, and not so eye-wateringly expensive as to draw an involuntary ‘Holy fucking Christ HOW MUCH?’ from my lips. When I tried them on they pinched a bit, but only a bit, and the leather was soft, oh so soft, and oh my word the shape sì sì ecco la mia carta di credito grazie.
They crushed the life out of my feet with the remorselessness of a Burmese python killing a rat.
I persisted for a while, kidding myself that all worthwhile human-shoe relationships go through teething problems. It was the weather – very humid today, my feet must have swollen – or it was the socks – never liked those socks anyway – or it was something else – anything else – anything to avoid pinning the blame on the objects of my ill-judged desire. In this assessment, it turned out, I was as mistaken as a chaffinch trying to befriend a sparrowhawk.
I wore the shoes seven times, each outing more agonising than the last, before finally laying them to rest half a year too late. And if you wish to read into this little tale a metaphor for human-human relationships, I am powerless to stop you.
Shoe-love takes myriad forms. My adoration of the pair pictured above has, as you might already have guessed, nothing to do with looks. We’ve been an item for nearly two decades, and we’ve been through a lot together. Well, I say ‘a lot’ – it’s mostly been mud. And they have been the most faithful and comfortable foot-huggers you could wish for, moulding themselves to my non-existent arches, easing the agony of blisters, giving succour to ageing feet in a way no aromatherapeutic foot massage could ever hope to emulate.
These shoes, belaboured into submission over the years, are nearing the end. Just a few more miles, that’s all I ask of them, before I have them embalmed and mounted over the mantelpiece. I hardly dare clean them any more, for fear that removing the caked mud – evidence of years of sludgey trudging – will unravel them once and for all.
They are visibly and audibly beginning to lose it. A crack has appeared in the outstep of the left foot. They squeak now, little expressions of ageing and distress, the miles catching up with their fabric, each little noise a tiny rebuke to me and my brutality. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.
Recently they’ve been clinging to my feet a little too needily. But I keep at them, trying to nurse them through the last few walks, kidding them that the twenty-three-miler on Thursday was the longest they’ll have to endure before retirement.
Please nobody let on what I have planned for Bank Holiday weekend.
The Isle of Wight looks innocuous enough on the map, a little diamond nestled into south England’s underbelly. Then you agree to walk round it, all of it, and you realise that sixty-six miles is a long way.
A lot of it is flat, of course. But a lot of it isn’t. And most of the not flat bits will come at around 5 in the morning. We eschew sleep. Sleep is for sensible people, and that we are patently not.
It’s not ‘for’ anything, this walk. I’ve done that before. I’ve cycled through the night in aid of Contented Dementia; I grew a moustache for a load of bollocks. And while I did raise useful money, I’ve begun to feel uncomfortable with the thought of charitable giving being contingent on some sort of physical hardship, as if cancer only deserves to be cured if I traverse the Alps on a unicycle.
(Sidebar: John Finnemore captures this idea rather better than me in the ‘Bahamas’ sketch, for which the transcript is here, in case you were thinking I’d nicked it without crediting the original author.)
So I’m doing the walk because I’m slightly idiotic, and because I like a challenge, and because I enjoy the company of my two brothers-in-law, my co-idiots in this endeavour (although get back to me on that last one at around 5am on May 6th and see if you get the same answer).
But sometimes life does things and you have to react.
I’ve never met Cleo. I know her mum and dad – we’ve shared the concert stage on many occasions, and they are as good a pair of people as you could hope to meet.
Cleo is nine, and she’s been diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour. The prognosis is poor.
It’s the kind of thing that has me railing impotently at the sheer absolute bastardry of life. Monsters roam free, living long and healthy lives, building media empires, becoming heads of state (MENTIONING NO NAMES). And innocent nine-year-old girls get brain tumours.
Fuck you, life. Absolutely fuck you.
So while I’m not walking ‘for’ anything, I do know that when it gets to 5am on May 6th, with 15 miles still to go, and my beloved walking shoes creaking and leaking and falling apart, I will think of Cleo and her bravery and the searing injustice of it all, and I will not stop, even though my feet will berate me with every fibre of their being.
In a way, it’s a useless form of stubbornness. It will do nothing for Cleo. But it’s all I’ve got.
If you wish to support Jane and Alex’s chosen charity, it’s here. In Jane’s words, ‘We’re unlikely to win this one, but I’d like to believe that could change for other families in the future.’
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And I’ll be thinking of that 9yr old too