New shoes

19 Jun New shoes

I bought some plastic mules the other day. There’s a first time for everything, I suppose. Urban Brand Street Style is written on the footbed as if to claim hip status. They’re ugly, but then cool stuff often is. Beige plastic that may or may not be recycled – I live in hope.

I bought them in Alnwick (pronounced Annick), an old Northumbrian town near the coast. The streets were full of people like me, people with a bus pass and later life freedom – the constraints of employment or parenting long loosened and the pension sufficient for days out during the week or whole weeks of car trips, B&B’ing, caravanning or the like.

It was a busy shop where you could buy handbags, scarves, t-shirts, hats, placemats, miniature replicas of castles, baby bootees, little Paddington Bears peeping out of Paddington Bear bags and a daschund, almost life-size, washable at 30 degrees. Oh, and shoes. Bustling with people browsing, such shops are a staple of British holiday towns, Meccas for people away from home, briefly carefree, vulnerable to rashly deciding they need something they really don’t. I know, I’ve done it myself, indulged myself when the normal day-to-day inhibitions are put aside. ‘Go on, you’re on holiday.’ ‘Bound to be useful and such a bargain, you really can’t not!’

My purchase, on the other hand, was necessary and urgent, a case of self-preservation rather than self-indulgence. Two days of enthusiastic walking, 18 miles each day, did for my newly fragile feet. I’ve never seen a blister the size of the one on the sole and heel of my right foot. I have it on good authority that it’s likely to be the thinning of the fat pads that caused the problem – an age-related thing, apparently, particularly challenging for those of us who never had much in the way of fat pads to start with. The stuff they don’t tell you about the creeping accruals of time on body.

As a milestone birthday approaches, I’ve been squaring up for a while now to all sorts of possible nastinesses on my personal horizon: bad knees and arthritic joints; arrhythmia and palpitations; faltering eyesight and hearing loss; the forgetting of names and important events. Luckily none of these have yet materialised – well, the occasional name slips my mind, I’ll admit, but I put it down to a mind that’s full and busy. A brace of perfectly manageable long-term conditions, for sure, but the wearing out of my feet. Really?

There are compensations to being hors de combat. The bus journeys take me to villages of stone cottages and glorious gardens. The red valerian is elegant in a lazy, unkempt way and plentiful, perfectly at home in a garden border or along the roadside beneath hedgerows still bejewelled with hawthorn blossom. As I sit writing this it’s blooming on top of an old brick wall opposite the pub where I’m sipping a soda and lime. That and, variously, cups of tea and coffee mark the hours during my days. The church bells are peeling non-stop for a wedding about to take place. Some of the guests stopped by for a drink before the ‘do’, all dolled up – waistcoats and tails, high heels and hats perched at gravity-defying angles.

As I walked the few metres from the bus stop, euphorbia and alchemilla nestled alongside Johnson’s Blue geraniums in front of an old stone wall. That Johnson, whoever he was, captured a striking blue that sparkles in the sun and glows in the evening light. Enchanting, though the name is a little unfortunate these days… There are no hills of any scale along this coast, just a few bluffs of higher ground where somebody sometime built a castle. Dunstanburgh is big but ruined, a lonely, melancholy shadow at the edge of the sea; Bamburgh is big and brash, reconstructed in the 19th century, an enormous citadel best viewed from a distance, perhaps, against a rising sun. Tomorrow we might get our first sighting of the castle on Lindisfarne cast out into the sea and hosting saints and angels.

Glimpses of the coastal trail tantalise. My three walking companions continue, able-footed, to stride out the miles along St Oswald’s Way. As the youngest of the four it’s unsettling to be, on this trip at least, the least robust. While they take to the trail each morning, I rattle along on the X18 or the 418 bus, tastelessly shod in beige plastic, beloved hiking boots in the rucksack. Come the evening I hear the news of their journey and relish their pleasure. And rue the missing of it.