Shoes

[purplecat]

A recent discussion on lil_shepherd's journal on the subject of shoes left me pondering the fact that I seem to have an awful lot of shoes given there are only three pairs I wear. I decided a rationalisation was in order!




These are the shoes I wear regularly: slippers, every day shoes, and trainers for running.


Shoes for best. The most that can be said from them is they are not too uncomfortable or too scruffy.


The sandals conundrum. The pair on the left are incredibly comfortable and in imminent danger of collapse. The pair on the right are supposed to be their replacements. Last summer was so miserable I never really got the chance to wear them in so they are still viewed as uncomfortable and potentially dangerous.


Miscellaneous hobby shoes. I kept them all on the ground that you never know when you may want to go sailing or take up dancing again. Except for the lone character shoe, even I couldn't think of a situation where one character shoe might be of value and I resisted the temptation to hang onto it on the off chance the other would show up.


Old pairs of slippers. I tossed all of them except the brown boots which were not too battered and have been Kept In Case of Emergency. The blue pair had hardly been worn at all but kept falling off, so they got put in the bag of clothes that will be donated to charity at some unspecified point in the future.


The shoes I got married in. I figure I'm allowed to keep these for reasons of sentimentality.


Shoes I never intend to wear again. The black pumps I bought as slip-ons for Japan but never needed them and I don't like slip-ons. The middle pair tried to cripple me this time last year and the pair on the right I wore at sophievdennis's wedding but my conclusion is that I really don't do heels. All got put in the charity bag.


Boots. I can't remember when I last wore the black pair but I put them in the charity bag on the grounds of heels. The walking boots were brought as replacements for my Braisher boots when one of those mysteriously vanished in our last move. However, after a couple of years, it turned up behind a Scooby Doo game and these boots have been redundant since. However the Braisher boots are kept in the car so occasionally these get taken out (as they did last week) when there is snow on the ground and I don't want to faff about opening the car. In the end I kept them.


Old every day shoes being Kept In Case of Emergency. I decided that I was unlikely to need four pairs of back up emergency shoes. On close examination three of these pairs had very worn soles and, in some cases, visible holes. My current every day shoes are beginning to feel like a hole is forming under my left foot so I decided to keep the pair that didn't obviously have worn soles (bottom right) as replacements for when my current pair wear through and keep the least battered of the others (bottom left) In Case of Emergency.

Comments

[fififolle]

This is a priceless post. Just saying *g*
It makes me want to make my own post of every pair of shoes I own, but I fear In Case Of Emergency would turn up rather too often as well.
You don't have to be Imelda Marcos to have too many :)
And why are new ones never as good as the ones they are supposed to replace?

[purplecat]

I know! New shoes are the worst. And I really find it hard to explain why I can't bring myself to throw away clearly broken shoes just on the off chance my current pair suddenly become much worse than the old pair.

[nyarbaggytep.livejournal.com]

I do the exact same thing. New shoes *are* potentially dangerous - particularly when they lull you into a false sense of security by feeling fine until they start hurting as you've walked just far enough away from home for them to utterly cripple you as you hobble back.

[purplecat]

I'm glad it's not just me that happens to. I've always vaguely felt shoes were against me.

[nyarbaggytep.livejournal.com]

Me too! It is nice not to be alone in it.

[fififolle]

I'm getting much better at throwing things away now. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing!

[purplecat]

I think mostly it's a good thing, though one does occasionally regret having thrown something away. But in the absence of houses of infinite capacity one can not keep everything.

[fififolle]

*whimper*
The only thing I regret throwing away was my legwarmers...

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I'm enormously impressed that you only have one pair of Sandal Dilemmas. I think I've got about 5 in different shades of 'falling to bits but oh so comfortable' and 'newish but uncomfortable'.

[purplecat]

Sandals seem particularly prone to giving blisters when new which is odd because you would have thought, being generally made of softer leather, that they would shape to your feet more quickly.

[reggietate.livejournal.com]

Fascinating :-) My shoes, like my clothes, are all men's stuff, so it's boots (Caterpillar, black leather ankle boots, canvas/suede 'bumper boots', goretex (sp?) boots I wear to go to work in when the weather's bad), trainers of various kinds, very old rawhide type brown leather shoes, and two pairs of black smart shoes which almost never get worn because I hardly ever wear suits any more.

I think the brown leather shoes are the oldest - about twenty years.

[purplecat]

I think it is just possible the ballet shoes are twenty years old, but then it must be a decade since I've worn them in earnest so I'm not sure that counts. The black boots I put in the charity bag may also have been almost that age, I think I acquired them in a house clearance around 1995/1996 ish but I hardly ever wore them even before I swore off heels.

[reggietate.livejournal.com]

Thankfully, I've always managed to avoid heels. They're a menace.

[kristen-mara.livejournal.com]

I think you should feel very content after that little clean up! I had a pair of gold Egyptian style sandals that I loved but they were too tricky to wear...

[purplecat]

I am pleased. I've slowly been doing a lot of clearing out of stuff. We're never going to win prizes for minimalism, but the house is a lot less cluttered than it was.