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I thought only girls fell in love with shoes, but Paul and I went to Freeport this afternoon and it happened to me.

We woke up to rain, so stayed in bed hoping it would pass while I read a chunk of the bundle of proofs I’d beought home on Friday. It didn’t, and so after eating breakfast under the duvet, showering and checking email we headed out in the car with no firm plans in mind.

After several miles and just as many random turns we arrived in Braintree and as the rain was as hard as ever pulled into Freeport, the discount shopping ‘village’ just outside town. Why they call it a ‘village’, I don’t know - it’s just a mall without a roof as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, we both needed shoes, and in the third shop we tried I slipped on some light brown trainers that felt like no shoes I had ever worn before. Even if you took the most comfortable pair of shoes you could imagine and wore them for a year, so they were soft and molded to the shape of your foot they would come nowhere close to feeling like these.

I wanted to buy them on the spot, but the colour was completely wrong and I’d have had to buy two new pairs of jeans to go with them. That being the case I don’t really know why I tried them on, but doing so was a true revelation.

As the rain got harded and the wind got colder, we hid away in Aroma, then gave up on shoes and came home, but that pair has set a benchmark that will be hard to match. From now on, it’s going to be a long tedious hunt.

I made tea in my cereal bowl-size cups when we got home, and we listened to the chart as we dried off and warmed up. Neither of us had a real urge to go back out in the bad weather, but we both wanted to go to the gym. Paul hadn’t been for a fortnight because of his holiday and the last time I went was Wednesday evening.

So, when I’d finished filing away the folders and papers that have traditionally lived under my bed into the new storage crate I built yesterday afternoon, we braved the weather and plodded along on the treadmills for an hour.

I sat in the sauna for a while, and I think it was only then that I felt I had fully warmed through.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2002 at 11:44 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.