slider way, give it all you got

Here's a crackpot theory for you, and, as all the best theories do, it has to do with Robert Redford, who died last week at the age of 89, and shoes.

The only films in which Redford starred which I could say with complete confidence that I've seen are Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, The Sting, All The President's Men, The Great Waldo Pepper, Out Of Africa and Pete's Dragon. The first three there are obviously classics, the fourth is a bit of fluff with some surprisingly dark moments thrown in (such as Susan Sarandon falling off an aeroplane, or when Redford's character has to cave a fellow aviator's head in with a hunk of timber to prevent him burning to death in his crashed plane), the fifth is a bit turgid for my taste and I can't honestly remember Redford even being in the last one, presumably because I was distracted by a giant furry green CGI dragon.

Anyway, the central point made in a number of the obituaries was that it was easily to be distracted from his acting ability by how absurdly handsome he was, something easy even for a tediously vanilla heterosexual bloke such as myself to appreciate. That is something that Redford himself complained about (but not too much; I mean, come on) in the context of it limiting his range of roles. The quote that was circulating on the internet after his death was this one from director Mike Nichols in relation to Redford being considered for the role that eventually went to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate:

“I interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands, of men,” Nichols explained. “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser.’ And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘O.K., have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.” 

What you might be asking at this point is: yes, but what does all this have to do with shoes? Well, I'll tell you. I was at Newport Leisure Centre the other day taking the girls to a swimming lesson, and there were several people there sporting what these days seems to be quite a common footwear combo of shortish white sports socks pulled up quite tight, and sliders. I assume the original idea was to give some sort of post-training-session Premiership footballer vibe, but it seems pretty ubiquitous now. One of the Dads who was supervising the activities of his child in the showers even had socks and sliders on and must have been getting wet socks. 

So, getting to the point, my thesis is this: there are two sorts of people in the world, with two fundamentally different sorts of outlook on it, and life. The first sort either apply absolutely no thought whatsoever to what might happen beyond two minutes from now, or have a sort of blithe assurance that all will be well, nothing can or will go wrong, and they won't ever get into a position where they get stranded (e.g. if the car breaks down) on the way home from the swimming run and have to hike across a field in the dark in sliders, flip-flops, whatever. The other group of people assume that these things may well happen and that some more robust ready-for-anything footwear may be required. I myself for instance do own a pair of flip-flops, but they are strictly for home or holiday use and never worn in any situation where I might be required to do anything involving walking any significant distance or driving a car. I might wear my Converses or Vans if I'm in a cazh mood and the weather is warm and dry, with the caveat that I probably wouldn't wear the Converses for the swimming run as the thin canvas material and those two little instep holes mean they suck up water pretty effectively.

Looking at it another way I think this probably also divides down the nerd/jock boundary, where the nerd contingent might be slightly more inclined to get into the habit of wearing shoes that facilitate a quick getaway in the event of trouble. To put it another way, people who might feel a need to escape from other people (anyone who was ever bullied at school, for instance) might be more inclined to wear escape-facilitating footwear than those who might more generally expect other people to run away from them.

The pursuer/pursuee (yeah, I know, not really a word) model works for linking this back to Robert Redford as well - imagine (if you can) being someone who looked like him. I don't want to use the phrase "beating them off with a shitty stick" but it seems pretty appropriate here; it's hard to imagine him ever having to expend very much effort to be in the company of someone who wanted to get into his pants. The only advantage for the rest of us who might have to work slightly harder is that (this is what I choose to believe, anyway) since we had to work a bit harder at attracting a partner in the first place, and additionally might have more of an incentive to keep them around, we might be more inclined to generosity and attention to detail in the bedroom department, if you know what I mean, ladies. 

we'll tear your sole apart

Time for a deep dive into the world of shoes; my shoes in particular. I have no authority to speak for or about anyone else's shoes, nor would I be so presumptuous as to seek to do so. But I am conscious that I have in the past marked the passing of certain items of footwear, in particular shoes dedicated to the specific pursuits of running and walking, and by walking I suppose I sort of mean mountain hiking, rather than just going down the shops; you can pretty much wear any shoes for that, after all.

So I see that I commemorated the passing of my old Saucony running shoes in favour of a fairly cheapo pair of Crane-branded ones from Aldi; at some point after that I upgraded those to a pair of blue Nikes for running purposes, probably around the time I decided to have another crack at getting into doing parkruns in 2018. Those did me for a while but earlier this year I decided it was time to invest in another pair. Now at some point between about 2018 and 2025 there's been a revolution in the world of running shoes whereby every pair you can buy now has these absurdly thick bouncy soles. This has caused some controversy among elite athletes who could suddenly complete entire marathons in a single bound and some restrictions have had to be applied. The pair of Asics shoes I eventually bought are by no means the most extreme example but, as you can see from the photo, are much thicker than the old wafer-thin Nikes, though of course these have had to endure the best part of a decade of being pounded flat by my gargantuan weight. I should add that the new ones are also absurdly comfortable and forgiving of my elephantine running style and certainly reduce the impact of my clumsy lumberings so that I can now hear my music over the deafening thwacking of my feet on the pavement. As a data point I haven't broken the world marathon record or anything while wearing them but I have recently slightly lowered my long-standing parkrun PB. More tedious parkrun evangelism and nerdy stattery in a later post.

You might also recall the progression of my walking shoes from the old Salomons, which bit the dust after a soggy visit to Pembrokeshire in 2010, through the brown Tevas (which are probably still my favourite pair of walking shoes of all the various ones I have ever owned), to the blue Karrimor pair I bought in late 2016. That pair were first-choice walking shoes for only a relatively short space of time as they weren't all that good and were replaced by a pair of grey Mammut shoes I got in Go Outdoors in what was probably around 2018. I can narrow the date down in this way because while I'm still in the Karrimors in this photo at the top of Pen y Fan in June 2018, I'm in the Mammuts in the following photo of me atop Striding Edge in the Lake District in April 2019.

But eventually the Mammuts too became a victim of their own success, by which I mean they were so comfortable they ended up getting worn all the time, and needed replacing, which they have now been by this splendid pair of North Ridge shoes, also purchased from the excellent people at Go Outdoors only a few days ago. You will notice, though, that the super-thick and bouncy soles thing has now extended to walking shoes as well. 

Note also that I still possess both the blue Karrimors, which are very much relegated to mowing the lawn and other gardening activities these days, and my pair of grey Tevas which I bought as a backup for the brown pair, never liked or wore quite as much, and which a couple of decades later the soles are starting to fall off. What will happen now is that the Mammuts will be relegated to general odd-job shoes and the Karrimors and Tevas will be relegated to, erm, the bin. The ciiiiircle of liiiife, etc. 

bog standard

So obviously with ankle rehabilitation progressing well and new boots ready to be tested it only remained to find an opportunity to go and test ankle and boots out by going for a long walk. It's currently school half-term and Nia and I have been trying to tee up a crack at Pen y Fan, which she's very keen to do. That's pencilled in for the end of this week but I managed to wangle a free day yesterday as well so I took myself off for a walk after dropping the kids off at their grandparents' in Abergavenny. Now I've done a lot of walking in the vicinity of Abergavenny over the years: there's the Sugar Loaf, the Blorenge, the Black Mountain, Table Mountain above Crickhowell, Coity Mountain near Blaenavon and various Skirrids. So a lot of the obvious boxes have been ticked, and I fancied doing something new rather than re-doing something I'd already done.

The obvious area in the vicinity that I'd never set foot on was the big plateau to the south-west of Crickhowell, cut roughly in half by the B4560 running north-south across it, with the eastern half being Mynydd Llangatwg and the western half being Mynydd Llangynidr. So I planned a circular route, found a car park and set off. 

The first thing to say here is that this isn't a mountain walk in the classical sense: firstly because the car park is at about 440 metres and the high-altitude point of the day is at 541 metres, so there isn't a lot of ascent involved. Furthermore while the two areas either side of the road are each called "mountain" (that being what the Welsh word "mynydd" means) they are actually just one vast plateau with no obvious summits. The focal points of the day are the two trig points, the first one barely a mile and a half into the walk at 541 metres and the second at 529 metres atop a slightly more impressive pile of bits of shattered limestone about four miles to the east. The important thing to say about the first one is that this isn't even technically the summit of Mynydd Llangynidr - that is at 557 metres about a mile and a half to the west, but I couldn't see a way of including it in the walk without increasing the amount of exhausting slogging across trackless wastes to beyond the limits of even my sanity.

Getting from the first trig point to the second is the main challenge of the day - as you can probably imagine a vast flat area of mountain upland in South Wales is going to attract and retain quite a bit of water. The section from the first trig point to the road is basically OK, as is the section from the road to the intermediate high point here. Looking east from there across the slightly lower-lying area between you and the higher ground of Mynydd Llangatwg (the knobbly bit in the centre of the picture) is, I imagine, an experience not unlike gazing across the blasted trackless wastes of Mordor towards Mount Doom.

It's important to take an attitude of Zen-like calm and fatalism here: there's really no way of knowing in advance which is the best (which basically means driest) route, and so the thing to do is pick out a rough route by eye and then just go for it. In hindsight, though, it might have been better to go to the south (right in the photo above) of the two ponds rather than trying to pick a route between them. Around halfway through trying to do that I encountered a very wet section and no amount of hasty high-stepping over tussocks could prevent a certain amount of water from entering over the tops of my boots, instantly invalidating my intended testing of their waterproofing. The advantage of being in such an unfrequented spot is that you can bellow CUUUUNNNT as loud as you like and no-one will mind. 

Once you've gained the high ground of Mynydd Llangatwg, bagged its trig point and dropped off to the north to get out of the wind and eat a pork pie and a Granny Smith, you can quickly drop off the northern edge of the escarpment and down onto a path which hugs the contours along the bottom of the cliffs back towards the car park. I had expected this to be a longish and slightly tedious tail to the walk, but it's actually not quite as simple as that: the first section takes you through some interesting old limestone quarry workings and into the Craig-y-cilau nature reserve, part of the path through which follows the route of an old quarry tramway along a terrace halfway up the cliff. This is an absolute delight to walk after the tedious squelching that's gone before, and once that ends you drop down into some wooded valleys that are equally delightful, if a bit muddy and slippery in the wet. The path then leads past the raised bog at Waun Ddu - apparently very unusual and ecologically significant, though to be honest not much to look at. 

Apparently the area beyond the stream to the right here is an unusual "raised bog". I bet you thought that's just what happened when you left the toilet seat up, guys, amirite? pic.twitter.com/xX81KlOjcj

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) October 25, 2021

That's your lot for excitement, though, the tedious tail to the walk then materialises, just slightly later than expected, and you have to slog the last two slightly uphill miles along a road.

I can't honestly say I'd recommend this route to anyone but tedious hill-bagging completists and those of an obsessively misanthropic nature - after leaving the car park where there were a couple of guys in an army Land Rover doing mysterious army shit involving shouting into a radio a lot the next time I saw a human being was at around six miles in when I caught a glimpse of the top half of a farmer from about fifty yards away. I then passed within hello-ing distance of a young couple and an elderly lady and her dog while walking through the woods, but that was about it. I enjoyed myself, but I am aware that I find enjoyment in a whole variety of perverse activities that many would find unpalatable.

As an exercise in assessing boot comfort and ankle recovery it was pretty effective, though: marshy tussocky terrain like this is murder on the ankles even when they aren't injured. Twenty-four hours later I would describe my ankle as a bit sore, but not cripplingly so. We'll see what a shorter but steeper (and hopefully drier) walk on Friday does to it.

Route map (start at the green flag thingy in the top left corner and proceed anticlockwise) and altitude profile are below: the altitude profile illustrates how this is very much a walk of two contrasting halves. Note that the starting altitude (calculated by my phone's GPS) and, as a consequence, all the other altitudes, are about fifty metres too high.

I also took a few photos, which can be found here. 

maybe a reboot will fix it

One thing you can certainly say about me, in addition to all the less palatable stuff about being fat, bald and malodorous, is that I am not some sort of fickle fly-by-night flibbertigibbet when it comes to owning walking boots. This is partly because I am as tight as a gnat's chuff: walking boots are expensive and I want to be sure that when I purchase a pair they're going to last a while. Obviously I want them to be comfortable as well and that generally requires some outlay of cash, since in general you broadly get what you pay for, so there's a middle ground to be found between super-comfortable boots of solid gold that cost a gazillion quid and dirt-cheap boots that grind your toes off and leak like a sieve.

Leaking like a sieve, as it happens, is the thing that usually indicates that it's time to buy a new pair of boots, rather than anything absurdly dramatic like the soles falling off. And, just as the early-2007 Dartmoor trip finished off the old Berghauses, so it was for my 14-year-old pair of Salomon boots, under suspicion for a while for no longer being everything one might wish for in the waterproofing department and finally caught bang to rights during our soggy trip up the Blorenge in February, the second half of which was a fairly miserable cold squelchy experience.

As those of you who keep up with my insane ramblings on Twitter will know (it's mentioned in the Blorenge post as well), I've been suffering from quite painful ankle tendinitis for most of 2021 which has restricted my activities in the walking and running departments. Now that a proper full recovery finally seems to be in sight and I am under strict orders from the podiatrist and physiotherapist to go out and challenge myself with some exercise, my mind has turned to walking activity (I've already got back to the parkrun with Nia a couple of times) and I don't really want wet feet again. So we went over to Go Outdoors in Cardiff and I bought a new pair of boots. I've gone back to old-school leather Berghaus boots, partly because they were exceptionally comfortable and partly because this pair were on sale for 60 quid off.

As I said when I bought the last pair, the old Berghauses were probably the best part of 20 years old, and the Salomons lasted 14 years, so I have basically had two pairs of boots for the entirety of my adult life. Will the new pair see me into my grave, or at least into the twilight of my mountain walking career? We shall see.

lay off of my blue suede shoes

Seems like only yesterday that I was unpacking my brown Teva walking shoes from their Amazon box and trying them on for the first time. But time passes, and you have to accept that things get older, change happens, and eventually you have to acknowledge that, hey, these shoes, while still exceptionally comfortable, are completely fucked and starting to fall apart, which'll be why water pisses into them when I wear them out in the rain. At this point you have to set sentiment aside, buy a new pair, throw the old ones away and move on.

So here, just to remind you, is the photo that accompanied the transition from my equally venerable, well-loved and constantly-worn Salomons to the Tevas, back in January 2010, and below it is a photo marking a similar transition from the Tevas (which, as you can see, have frayed and collapsed in on themselves over six-and-a-half years in a very similar way to Michel Houellebecq's face) to my jazzy new blue Karrimors, acquired at a bargain £31 online from Sports Direct.

I'm not sure I expect the Karrimors to last six-and-a-half years, but in a way they don't have to as they were less than half the price of the Tevas. In fact they were so cheap as to be three pounds cheaper than the latest pair of shoes we've bought for Alys, which, especially when you consider the quantities of materials involved, is a bit farcical.

Obviously it's the construction rather than the materials you're paying for. You'll recall my plaintive reference to "hilariously expensive tiny shoes" in this old whisky review, well here they are.

here are the shoes headlines

Never mind all that stuff about books and golf, you'll be saying, we haven't had a shoes news update for a while. And you're right, we haven't. So here it is. Let's get the hello clouds, hello sky, reduce/reuse/recycle, tree-hugging hippy crap out of the way first: I've got a much-loved pair of old Dr. Marten desert boots which I sometimes wear to work and which are structurally perfectly sound, but which were starting to look a bit dilapidated owing to their never having been cleaned or polished even once in the ten years or so I'd had them. Finally I decided some polish was probably in order, and since they'd acquired a few marks over the years perhaps of a slightly darker hue than the faded light tan they'd gradually become. As it happens darker brown was all we had in the shoe polish box anyway, so the decision was made for me. Quite a noticeable transformation, as I think you'll agree:

Might get another few years of semi-respectable wear out of those yet. Less salvageable were my two pairs of golf shoes. Both quite elderly, both just about holding together in the uppers department, but both completely knackered in the studs department to the extent that I couldn't get the old ones out or any new ones in. So when the opportunity arose of of buying a set of particularly vomit-inducing orange and grey Dunlops for 30 quid from Sports Direct, I grabbed it with both, erm, feet. All I'll say about their efficacy is: last round with the old shoes: 110; first round with the new ones: 93.

Lastly, my battered old Saucony running shoes. Now I don't want you to think I'm out pounding the streets on a regular basis, but I harbour some fantasies about doing the Newport parkrun a bit more than the pitiful two times I've managed it so far. So I'd been toying with the idea of a new pair, but I don't use them enough to justify much expense. So when I spotted a pair of basic-looking blue Crane running shoes for £9.99 in Aldi, I snapped them up. So far they've only been worn for a stroll round the block (and seem very comfortable), but you can't rush into these things.

that's quite a feet

It's tabloid innumeracy time again. Have a look at this Daily Mail story about some canoe-footed freak who sent off for a pair of slippers off the internet, one a size 13 and the other a size 14½. He got the size 13 one back all right, or so the story goes, but there was a decimal point mix-up with the other one and he ended up with a size 1450 slipper! Which is seven feet long! Those crazy inscrutable Chinese.

Now I know what you're thinking, because it's what I was thinking - why would a decimal point mix-up result in a size 1450 slipper? A size 145 one, sure, but how and why would they have slipped the extra zero in? And while there isn't a strict linear relationship between shoe sizes, surely common sense dictates that a ratio of 100 between the shoe sizes would have resulted in a ratio of more than seven (if we assume, and let's do that for the moment, that the proper size one would have been about a foot long) between the slippers?

Time to pop over to Wikipedia for the lowdown on how UK shoe sizes are calculated. It turns out that the length difference between successive shoe sizes is a barleycorn, or a third of an inch, and that an adult size 1 shoe will fit a foot 8⅔ inches long. The upshot of which is that given either the shoe size S or the foot length L (in inches) you can calculate the other by plugging it into one of the following formulae:

• S = 3L - 25
• L = (S + 25)/3

So if you had a foot that was exactly a foot long, you would take a size 11 shoe. Similarly, a size 14.5 shoe would fit a foot (14.5 + 25)/3 = 13.2 inches long.

So what of the claim in the original story? Well, let's plug some numbers into the formulae and see what falls out. A seven-foot slipper is 84 inches long, which means it corresponds to shoe size 227. On the other hand, a size 145 slipper is 56.7 inches long, or about 4 feet 9 inches. Stick an extra factor of ten into the mix, though, and you find that a size 1450 slipper is 491.7 inches long, or a fraction under 41 feet. Considerably bigger than the one in the picture, clearly.

So pretty much none of the numbers in the Mail's story bear any resemblance to reality. It seems most likely that what they've got hold of here is a publicity stunt for a shoe-related website, combined that with a failure to do even the most basic checking of either the facts or the sanity of the numbers being thrown around, and vomited up this pointless abomination onto the page.

stitch this

One's jeans yielding under the immense outward pressure imposed in the groinal department and subsequently requiring repairs is one thing, but you don't really expect to have to sew up your shoes.

However, it appears that I have one foot bigger than the other, or possibly just more misshapen and abrasive than the other, because my shoes show an interesting and consistent pattern of wear, as the pictures below show.

Firstly, my knackered old Saucony running shoes. Note that the right heel (on the left as you look at it: come on, keep up) is ragged and worn whereas the left one is relatively OK.


Then my beloved black and yellow Vans - both heels are pretty fucked up on these, but the right one is worse.


Finally my Teva walking shoes - I purchased these only about 18 months ago, but I have worn them almost constantly since, so they've got a few miles on the clock. And, as you can see, it's the right heel that has started to disintegrate.


But how to fix it? Well, various gluing options occurred to me, but in the end the best thing to do seemed to be to get the old needle and thread out and sew them up. Not easy, as getting a needle in and out of a concave surface in a confined space requires a few contortions, and a certain amount of swearing. But the end results are fairly tidy, I think, and hopefully will stave off further damage for a while. No idea how long it'll hold together, but we'll see.


Other sewing news: while out gardening the other day and doing a bit of frenzied digging with my wrecking bar, I managed to catch myself in the left tit with the hooked end, tearing my shirt in the process, so that wanted fixing too.

have I got shoes for you

You remember how, back in the day, you could take your worn-down shoes to a strange little bloke in a brown coat in a dingy little shop somewhere and get them repaired? New soles, heels, that sort of thing. I have a vague memory of a bloke in Newbury who used to run one of these sort of businesses from a disused railway carriage in a siding at Newbury railway station, along with the usual key-cutting and shoelace-selling, plus probably bestiality and serial killing I shouldn't wonder.

Of course this sort of business still exists, it's just that they're generally branches of Timpson's and therefore a bit more well-lit and fragrant and respectable. I am delighted to be able to tell you that Timpson's have an online shop where you can not only buy the usual shoelaces but also, fantastically, segs. I had no idea you could still get them.

Anyway, the point of all this is that these places are all well and good (apart from the bestiality and serial killing) for classic shoes with the leather and hard rubber soles, but many of today's hip and happening modern shoes have softer rubber soles which you can't really nail a replacement heel (or segs) to. Here's an example: my much-loved Petroleum suede loafers. Nothing wrong with them in the uppers department, but many years of wear and tear have taken their toll on the heels, as you can see. But what to do? As I say, nailing a spare heel on isn't going to work.

Fortunately help is at hand from the totally awesome and gnarly world of skateboarding. It turns out that the abrasive top surface of the modern skateboard, designed to stop you from sliding off when executing a reverse 720 goofy nosebone tail grab, or something like that, is a bit hard on the old Vans, and so something is needed to repair the associated wear and tear. And that something is: Shoe Goo! Available from many respectable online retail outlets, including SkateSlime and Amazon. In theory, as well as being good for sticking flappy bits of sole down and filling holes, Shoe Goo can also be used to rebuild worn soles back up to their former dimensions.

So I had an experimental initial application, during the course of which it became clear that a) it does go impressively hard and rubbery once dry, but b) it's quite runny before that, and that therefore some sort of temporary supporting structure would be required to build the heels back up. A bit of masking tape ought to do it. You'll need an applicator (and they don't supply one with the goo); I'd suggest a lolly stick or one of those little plastic spatulas you get with Araldite.

Run the tape round the heels, press it on, then pipe the goo into the required areas.

Results: not half bad actually. As you can see there's still room for improvement, though, particularly with the shoe on the left.

So, take two, same drill. The stuff dries sufficiently to remove the tape within 24 hours, but another day or two before actually wearing the shoes is probably prudent.The weird shiny transparent look soon scuffs up once you walk around a bit.

For total future peace of mind you could of course embed some segs in the still-soft goo. Maybe next time.

have I got shoes for you

As I tearfully commemorated the passing of my old Berghaus boots a while back, so I hereby mourn the passing of my faithful old Salomon walking shoes, which were a bit knackered and had started to leak, and look forward with tentative hope and expectation to a series of new snug dry-footed walking adventures with my newly purchased Teva shoes.

Just as it was the Dartmoor trip which finished the old boots off, I think the Salomons (which I must have had for at least eight years, maybe more) were pushed over the edge by the waterlogged later stages of the descent from Foel Cwmcerwyn in Pembrokeshire last July. I'm a bit wary of buying shoes (and to a lesser extent any form of clothing) over the internet what with the obvious impossibility of trying them on in advance, but as it happens these (which I got from Amazon for £67.50) are a perfect fit (though they are a size 10 whereas the Salomons were a size 11, oddly - maybe my feet have shrunk). As before, old on the left, new on the right.

new boots!

Meant to post this before going to Yorkshire, but forgot. Here it is anyway: a solemn moment - the passing of my faithful old Berghaus boots, purchased from Blacks in Bristol about 15 years ago and with many many miles on the clock. I think the double whammy of the Three Peaks Challenge last July and then the ill-fated Dartmoor trip in January finished them off. So I had to get myself a new pair - I chose a pair of fully Gore-Tex lined Salomon boots from the Kathmandu shop at the top of Park Street. And I got a free pair of socks! I wore them (boots and socks) for a couple of walks up in Yorkshire, and they're very comfortable. Just in case you can't work it out: old ones on the left, new ones on the right.