It has been a very grey, cloudy, wet day.
It has rained big fat raindrops from first thing this morning. It is awful weather, and makes me feel so unspeakably, helplessly sad for the poor people who have turned up here for a holiday, hoping for warm sunshine and peace, because there is none. It is cold, and dark, and windy, and you can’t see any mountains because of the thick clouds, and everybody is wearing anoraks or driving their cars and looking sour and irritable.
Another tiresome consequence of the weather is that there are enormous splashy puddles all over the place, which has made it impossible to feel philosophical about my leaky trainers, and rather grimly aware that I am going to have to blow some money on a new pair.
This isn’t really upsetting because of the money, but because new shoes are troubling in every way. I never seem to be able to get them to fit to my feet in the right places. At best they will feel peculiar, at worst they might even rub uncomfortably and make them sore. Certainly they will feel different underneath my ankle, round the heel and at the joints of my big toes where I have been having a go at growing some bunions for the last few years.
I will have to go and choose some more trainers, probably under the supervision of a supercilious sales assistant who will ask stupid questions like whether I want them for running or for the gym, to which, of course, there is absolutely no answer.
I will try on half a dozen pairs all of which will feel confusingly unfamiliar, and after a little while I won’t really be able to tell them apart and will feel concerned about their stiffness and lack of bend, and the colossally improbable price, and the sales assistant will sniff and tell me that if I want the thing that is right for my feet then I need to be looking at expensive ones, as if cheaper ones aren’t made for my feet but for some other random cheapskate feet.
In the end I will probably finish up choosing something which doesn’t seem too bad in the shop but which will be very alarming when I get them home and take them out of the bag.
The next thing that will happen is that I can expect several days when I start feeling very apprehensive before I have to put my shoes on, followed by a self-conscious tiptoeing walk which will make me look ridiculous, and unless they turn out to mould kindly and speedily to the shapes of my rather knobbly feet, the whole exercise might quite possibly conclude with hurling the poor things into the dustbin and returning to the leaky ones.
It was very easy when I was poor, because I always inherited my best friend Elspeth’s old trainers, because miraculously our feet are the same size and lumpy shape. I have always been rubbish at shoe shopping, so Elspeth did it, and indeed was responsible for the purchase of my very favourite and much-mended boots. I once had a go myself, and bought a pair of shoes that were too small. I didn’t realise that I had until Elspeth tried them on and she squeaked and complained immediately. I denied it and said that her feet must be bigger than mine, but they weren’t and I suffered in the shoes for ever after. Anyway, her trainers were lovely, with nice squishy sides and toe shapes ready-worn into them, but I am not poor now, and it seems a bit cheeky still to be asking for her cast off shoes.
It is a difficulty that Mark does not encounter because he always buys exactly the same pair of brown leather lace-up men’s shoes in Clarks every time his wear out. For some arcane reason he refuses to countenance trainers and regards mine with some level of mystification. The explanation that I wear them because they are comfortable clearly doesn’t wash, because quite often they are so intolerably uncomfortable that they don’t last beyond the first week, but I think that the real answer is likely to be that I am not sure that I am quite ready yet to be grown up enough to wear shoes the whole time.
My mother gave me some slip-on shoes the other week that she had bought to wear herself, but which turned out to be too big for her, and so I am currently trying to teach my feet to like them, since I don’t think the dictum about only a cad wearing slip-on shoes applies to women. It is very uphill, because there is an unfamiliar draught across the top of my foot where the laces ought to be.
This is one of those bits of me that I have got a frustrating incident of Asperger’s syndrome about, because if that particular bit is not encased underneath laces then nothing should touch it, and so if I am wearing trousers and sandals I have got to roll the trousers up, which does nothing for my endeavours to appear stylish and sophisticated.
I am going to have to bite the bullet and do it. I have been sitting here with unhappy wet feet ever since I got out of the taxi to post a letter to Oliver this afternoon, and I am feeling distinctly downhearted about it.
On the other hand, maybe the weather will cheer up.
