The Training Shoe Contingency

How many shoes must a man wear down...before you will call him a spendthrift bastard who needs to take better care of his shoes...

Ahhh the sixties. Pure poetry, man, from start to finish...

I pose this deep and meaningful question because it seems relevant to me today. As a bloke...as, if I may venture to add myself to altogether more august club, a man, I only have two feet. Actually, one and a half most days recently, blisters being the unutterable sods they are...but anyway. Two feet, standard issue for your average upstanding biped.

So when d and Ma agreed that today I Needed Shoes, I was pretty perplexed.
"I have training shoes, and walking boots, and business shoes, and two pairs of slippers, and posh goth-cowboy boots as well," I said. "How can I possibly need shoes? Shoes...I have. Long is what I am, by any sane reckoning, when it comes to the subject of shoes. Shoe-erly?"
d rolled her eyes at me. "Your trainers are dissolving from inside," she said with devastating brevity, making, it should be noted, abbbbbbsolutely no overt comment on what this said about the underlying power of my grimy feet-sweat.

"Oh," I said. "That."
"Yes dear. That. Now hurry up and get dressed, your mother'll be here in a minute."

I got casually dressed. As it happens, I got very casually dressed. I'd just come down the stiars when d mentioned, as if in passing,
"You need new trousers too. You can't wear those awful things any more?"
"Awful things?" I said, clueless.
"The ones you insist on wearing the guts out of to go to London."
"My comfy trousers? What's wrong with them now? I've only just gotten them properly broken in."
"No dear...just broken," she sighed, with the infinite world-weariness of wives everywhere.

I was aggrieved. Dead aggrieved, I was. If you've ever wanted to see a fat bloke be thoroughly aggrieved, all I can say is you should have been in our hallway this morning. I was about to explain the degree and quality of my aggreivement whem Ma turned up and we buggered off.

At the shoe store, Ma had apparently done a recce, and had a pair she thought I'd like put away. I didn't like them. I'm not entirely sure I didn't dislike them just because she'd bothered to do a recce and have them put away, but anyway, I quickly-ish found a pair of trainers I was happy with.

"Mind you, you can't use them for walking about in," said d. I blinked. I was about to ask whether these were special hopping trainers, when Ma chimed in.
"Well, no, course not. Mind you, you've got walking boots, haven't you?"
I agreed that I did, but felt compelled to ask what I was going to pay 20-odd quid for trainers for if they couldn't be used for the sundry and somewhat general purpose of walking about.
d headed me off - she's often able to read my mind and do that. I think it's an oestrogen thing, personally.
"They're training shoes. They're for the gym. Only the gym."
"Noooo," I said. "Trainers are trainers  you can use them for everything..."
The sales girl, sniffing the possibiility of a multiple sale, decided to chip in her half-dollar at this point.
"No, really, you can't," she said. "You need walking-about shoes too, really..."
"Walking-about shoes...?" I asked, growing weaker by the minute.
"Yeah..." she said. "Try these..."
These were thirty odd quidsworth of "walking-about shoes".
"Can't use those in the gym," said d before I had bothered to ask.
"So now I'm buying two pairs of shoes for one pair of feet?" I checked.
"Yes," said Ma, d, and the salesgirl almost in unison.
"Because the trainers will spontaneously combust if I have the audacity to walk about in them, and the walking-about shoes will automatically kick the gears out of all the gym equpiment?" I wanted to ask.
"Just because!" said d, heading off my brain at the pass.

So I came out with two pairs of shoes today. I swear, I'm going to need a wallchart in the hallway to remember which shoes to put on for which type of activity.

Next was the trouser-buying spree. This had the potential to be utterly miserable, given my Reappearing state. As it happened though, d handed me a pair of size 36 jeans, and they fit. A little snugly, I'd be the first to admit...but they fit. It was as I was taking them off and getting back into my highly casual outfit that she whipped the changing room curtain back to hand me a sweater.

I yelped, grabbed one leg of my jogging pants and covered my extreme modesty.
"Commando!" I squeaked. "That was that I was trying to tell you in the hallway. I'm commando today!"

She went away, laughing hysterically.
Two pairs of shoes, one pair of jeans and a sweater...

I have no idea how I came out with the sweater...

I'm thinking, by the way, of reinstating the Tuesday weigh-in, and cracking on again with some positive mental attitude, some appalling sweating and some proper portion control. What do we think? Back to Tuesdays and actually taking this thing seriously? I don't really want to feel the wave of dread again that I did when walking into a clothes shop this morning...although maybe that was just because I had too few feet and was going commando...