SHOE YOU

Flo has a black eye. The reason? She fell over because she had trodden down her school shoes into slip-ons. Had I noticed? Of course not. I’m far too busy telling her to do up her laces to see that the whole back half of the shoe is missing. So she slipped on Grannie’s highly polished floor (it would be, wouldn’t it) and ricocheted off the sofa into the log basket. Poor her, it really hurt.

The tears, the screams and the pain have all been forgotten now with the newfound drama and attention afforded by a black eye. What is even more satisfactory for Flo is that it looks better and better every day. But all that aside, as holder of the First Order of Bad Mothering I rush to the shoe shop to replace the dangerous shoes. Not least because everyone is looking at them and they truly are a disgrace.

Summer seems only a sunbeam away with this nice weather so instead of the dreary black lace-up it is time, chez Clarks, for a jolly little sandal. The boys come too and everyone wants new summer shoes. I peer at the price tags, over one hundred pounds for three new pairs of shoes. I have to sit down and have a think. I’m trying to remember when it was that we last visited this store. It all comes flooding back: October last year.

I show the shop assistant the sorry wreckage of Flo’s £40 shoe which, I work out, has been on her foot from 9am – 3pm for four months. I ask, with a slightly ratty tone to my voice, if she feels that this is a good representation of how one of their shoes should look after such a period of time. Now I’m not good at this and I realise from the look on the woman’s face that there have been women better versed and more able at complaint than me in the shop many times before me.

“Well, Madame, if they are looked after they should have a bit more wear.”

She might as well have said ‘Bad Mother’.

Max is giving me one of those looks that say ‘I’d rather drop down dead than be in this shop with you’, while Bobby is cheerfully choosing between the mega-expensive flashing trainer and the Commando sandal. Flo, who is sensitive to my plight, says,

“I don’t mind if I wear flip flops to school, they don’t cost much.”

You see, without boring my friends, I’d like to say that Clarks and Start Rite have us over a barrel. We, the middle class, have been brought up to wear them, come what may. The advertising has seeped in over many years. We believe our children need their designs for a healthy well-fitted shoe. But hang on, I say. There are children all over the world who haven’t had staggeringly expensive footwear foisted upon them as some kind of class statement. I don’t see my foreign mates hobbling about with deformed feet because they didn’t wear Clarks shoes from birth.

I decide that from now on we’re going to Shoe City. I am making a protest. I refuse to pay so much for my children’s shoes anymore. I don’t believe that the wearing of one sort of shoe for a few months compared to another can make any difference to my children’s feet, as long as they are the right size. Unless, that is, someone can prove it to me otherwise.

Life in the Slow Lane is written by Clare Kent. She has three children - Max is eleven, Flo is eight and Bobby is nearly seven - and lives in Wiltshire.

NEXT INSTALMENT: 16 APRIL 2003