Tag: Abandoned shoes

Foot, Where? – A Reflection

Some weeks ago I wrote about the odd shoes that, of late, I have begun to encounter all along the edges of our nation’s otherwise pristine highways.  (You can read it here) I don’t recall being conscious of them before, but it would now seem that many others were.  I have come very late to the party.  The internet is full of all manner of discussions, blogs and photo-journals, about this abandoned footwear.  I was blithely unaware of all of this until it was pointed out to me, and quite suddenly I began to wonder how come I had never noticed it before.  Lord knows, I am no stranger to the ‘vacant trawl’ through the internet.  It occurred to me that I could have been equally remiss with absolutely every other subject I have ever covered in a manner I hitherto considered my own. 

I realise that no-one, most particularly me, is capable of completely original thought and that, anyway, people only really find things funny if it strikes some chord of recognition within them, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I wasn’t actually looking in all the wrong places for my ‘inspiration’.  Each week I blithely remove and transcribe a tiny piece of my head onto WordPress.  It isn’t pretty (nor, it now appears, dreadfully original) but it is all that I’ve got.  If I need to find something else, I need to know where to look.  There is no point in scanning the news; everybody does that.  What are my chances of finding a different way through that lot?  There are big topics: Brexit, Covid, The Human Condition, which I can steer a bit of a course through, but most of the time it is the minutiae that sets me off.  I sort of bounce off the edge of things, chipping bits away, before I’m bounced off elsewhere, to find something else that is linked only by the gentle crunch of my cranium.  I see my blog as the scalp that holds all of the bruises together.

Anyway, I thought, for a little while at least, that it might be a good idea to try and find if some of the other things I have ‘discovered’ and written about have, themselves, already been discovered and written about by others, possibly much more adept at doing it than I.  I say, For a little while, because I realised quite quickly that this, almost certainly, would be the case in a whole lot more instances than I would actually care to consider.  I write this thing to keep myself sane.  To find out that I am little more than a hollow echo of everybody else is not going to be the greatest of crutches for my self-esteem.  The last thing a delicately plastered limb needs to see coming towards it is a circular saw.  To discover that what I have just seen for the first time has been on the cerebral iPlayer for years is probably not going to help me when I am clawing about in here for somewhere new to go.  Ignorance is probably my best recourse: my most adjacent route to bliss.  I think that I am, possibly, very good at ignorance.  And if I don’t know that somebody else has got there before me – if I haven’t seen solid proof of it – well then, it simply doesn’t exist, does it?  If I cannot see it, then it doesn’t exist, and if I can see it, then everybody else must have seen it, but never thought about it in quite that same way before.  Does that work?

Okay, I’ll sleep then…

Foot, Where?

I need your help.

I abandoned civilization and moved out into the countryside some forty years ago.  I have always, though, worked ‘in town’ and so the journey from home to work, from ‘back of beyond’ to, I presume ‘beyond’, is a daily, and largely uneventful, trek.  I take, not the fastest, nor the shortest, but the most picturesque route.  Along the way, I have grown used to the sight of all manner of squashed fauna, together with the discarded detritus of something that was once-upon-a-time finger lickin’ good, until, presumably, it began to smell like old socks in the car, whence it was tossed from the speeding window into the hedgerow from where the quaint check-shirted country folk gather it up, pausing only to loosen their braces and doff their tweedy caps, before it chokes the livestock.  This is my regular drive to the daily grind through a green and pleasant Drive-Thru rubbish dump and abattoir… 

Perhaps it is what they mean by Urban Sprawl.  I think it must be so, because an awful lot of people appear to be moving their beds out here – or at least their mattresses – which inhabit almost every gateway and length of single-track undergrowth past which I drive.  Perhaps this is what those nice gangmasters mean when they offer full bed and board to their Eastern European vegetable pickers.  The countryside does, after all, offer its own all-you-can-eat buffet – providing you don’t pick the wrong thing and find out, much too late, that you are ineligible for National Health Treatment.

Most things have some kind of logical explanation if you search hard enough (although the reasoning behind carefully clearing up your darling pooch’s odorous little package before dumping the plastic bag in which it is contained onto the path is a bit of a stretch) but the explanation I now seek may be even harder to find.  You may recall (it seems a very long time ago now) at the top of this piece, that I mentioned needing your help, well, here we are, at last, approaching the very foothills of my mountainous quandary.  Forgive me, I am getting there…

The other day I was running along a stretch of road between this village and the next, a stretch of country lane about 1km in length, when I stumbled across a flip-flop.  (Not literally of course, that would be quite a different tale.)  It was a single flip-flop (I checked – no wedding ring) blue, left foot and I couldn’t help but wonder how it got there.  Who, mid-way between two villages, might have lost a flip-flop, presumably without noticing, and carried on hobbling towards the next conurbation?  I cannot imagine a way in which it could have fallen inadvertently from a car – there is nowhere to stop.  Nor can I imagine it could have been lost by a cyclist.  Cycling is never easy in such footwear, but I believe that you would notice soon enough if you were not wearing one.  The pedal is far from the comfiest of things to have pressed against the sole.  How, and why, did the flip-flop get there?

I continued to mull this over when, a couple of days later, I went for my next run through the other end of the village and out onto a different country lane – although I’m not certain that you would know the difference if you were new to the area – where I found, mid-way between here and there, a single brown boot.  Not a walking, nor a working boot, but a boot of the ‘Chelsea’ variety in, as far as I could see, excellent condition; not at all a ‘country hike’ kind of a boot.  My flip-flop anxieties were revisited and magnified: this was not the kind of footwear that could simply fall off, regardless of what you were doing.  This was footwear that had to be removed.  My mind was once again filled with hows and whys.  I cannot envisage a circumstance in which a vehicle could have stopped at this point without completely blocking the narrow lane.  It, therefore, occurred to me that the boot must have been removed from its foot and ejected from a moving vehicle.  How on earth had it offended its owner so profoundly?  Kidnap did cross my mind, but this is a village, I would have heard.  The possibility of it having been lost by a walker is even more remote.  Why would they have taken it off?  Why would they have considered it preferable to walk on without it – unless, of course, they had previously lost the other one elsewhere and wanted to persuade a suspicious partner that they had indeed left home without them?  That one of them, at least, was not tucked under a distant bed.

I prepared to dispatch it to my mental ‘imponderable’ file – things that I cannot understand, but I have to let go before they tip me over the edge – when, on the very next day, on my journey to work along the afore-mentioned scenic route, I saw another shoe in the side of the road.  Not, before you ask, a right-footed flip-flop, nor a dandy brown leather boot, but a black Nike trainer (lost by a runner who did not notice that he was suddenly and unaccountably limping perhaps?)  I could not, I felt, have been more bemused.

I was (as I am in most circumstances) wrong.  Yesterday we drove to the coast for a walk along the beach and, on the way, I spotted three single shoes, all different, in verge and in gutter along the route.  What is going on?  Do they constitute some kind of Hobo Code, like the strange runes that I once used to see chalked across paths and gate posts, informing those that might follow that a sucker lived here who was always good for a slice of cake, a cup of tea and a fiver to be on your way?  If that is the case, why are they all out in the open countryside and why are they always single?  Where is the other shoe and why has it not been considered as worthy as its twin of pointing the way to a free meal?  I must admit, if I ever come across a pair, I will have to consider alien abduction…

If you have any ideas at all, please let me know.  I need to put this mystery to bed before, God forbid, I start finding socks…

The previous instalment of the running diary ‘Man on the Run’ is here.
The next instalment of the running diary ‘The Running Man Plods On’ is here.
The whole sorry saga started here.