Shoes Are The Fashionable Foot Implements Of The Devil

   I am not a shoe kind of a girl. I can appreciate a good looking sandal, and I can acknowledge the difference between the superb simplicity of a nice heel, and the god-awful fugliness of whatever in poo-perfect hell this is pretending to be.

   Thusly, I choose my footware in a manner I might describe as sparingly. I have one pair of shoes that I wear really, and they are this:

   Yup. Those are exactly as stylish and cutting edge as they look. They are Crocs and cost more money than I am personally worth, and as such were given to me about four years ago as a gift. Wearing these is like walking on a cloud of inappropriate sexual advances from the Ocean's 11 cast member of your choice.They don't require me to zip, lace, buckle or even velcro anything up, down or together, I don't have to wriggle, mangle or force my feet in any manner to occupy them, and I can slip them on or off at a moment's notice. They are black, which would have sat well with Mr. Ford, and so I can insist that they go with everything. They bear no distinguishing features other than those little decorative holes in the front, and that satiates my need to not traipse around wearing frou-frou bullshit all over my feet. I am not a fan of the redundant bow, zip, stud, buckle, or ornamental harness in any variety, and I abhor it in a shoe.

   Now here's where my puritanical pragmatism (and some might say almost heroic levels of frou-frou-related cynicism) becomes a problem. I have no proper fancy shoes to wear to my sister's wedding, which is happening this very Sunday. I have already done the Hunt For The Mythical Plus Sized Red Bridesmaid Dress That Is Not A MuuMuu last week, and shall some other time extemporise on the mysteries of adding a separate (smaller and exponentially uglier) section for the big ladies in an otherwise perfectly adept clothing store, instead of simply making the normal clothes all the way up to sizes that fit things that are not Keira Knightley. Now I had to go out into the big world with my agoraphobic self looking for plain court shoes in either black or red to fit a size 9 foot. I was even willing to squeeze my piggies into an 8 if it was a generous 8 and I could prophesy a night of sitting down a lot and ordering my date to fetch more drinks and/or cake.
   This was not apparently a reasonable request.
   Me and my mother gamely held our heads and bosoms high, blocking radio and cellphone signal for miles around, and marched into Centurion mall with our mission statement front and centre in our minds. We figured since we required neither bells, whistles nor multi-coloured jesters with our footwear this day, we would probably find our quarry in record time, maybe even in a place like Jet or Mr. Price where we could spend the money we had saved on other, more interesting things.
   The very first place we tried was Jet, and we found just such a shoe, but alas, nothing above a size 5. Edgars initially scared the living begeezus out of us by asking house prices for some basic pumps, but even upon revisiting them were we disappointed. The shoes that met the (ever widening) criteria were always either too small, or if they came up to even an 8 (never found a single 9, and we visited nigh on every single shop in Centurion that sells anything resembling a shoe) it would the 8 of a world gone by; an 8 of yesteryear, where toes were not so well regarded as today and thought of as a silly luxury only insisted upon by the frivolous.
   Shop after shop I would ask: "Good sir or madam, for I know not which by your ambiguous pallor, I seek a simple and plain as milk court shoe in a field sable or gules, with nought of bow nor zip nor strap superfluous, in size 8 or 9."
   Agog, they would answer me thus: "8?! The fuck is wrong with you, 8? Get the fuck out of here, there are civilised people trying to shop here! Fucking EIGHT. Pfsh." Those that had even heard of such mythical numbers as high as 9 stared in wonder down at my feet, no doubt immediately wanting to know if I had managed to find shoes in a size 9 elsewhere before, or had been forced to live my life a  barefooted gypsy- and if I had managed to find success being shod previously, for fuck sake's where?
   My mother and I began to wander around aimlessly through throngs of holiday shoppers, growing more and more delirious by the ankle-boot. I would swerve dangerously through innocent ladies and grab at any shoe with a shiny surface, getting glitter all over my hands, face and sternum. My lunges were desperate and artless as my hand would shoot out and violently retrieve a display shoe- my mother would shake her head silently at my anguished, pleading expression and gently put the shoe back, explaining that it was a ballerina flat in dark silver sequins, so fucking no.
   I sat down in Meltz, having recklessly kicked boxes out of the way to get to a seat, and shoved a pair of black semi-strappy high heeled dress sandals onto my weary footses. These were so far off my original game plan it was ridiculous, but by god the word "shoe" had started to loose all meaning and so IT NO LONGER MATTERED. With a quiver of something akin to dangerous hope in my eyes I raised my eyes to the mother towering over me.
   "Don't get too excited or anything but we may have a winner."
   She started to laugh. I stood up upon which my my pinky toe was immediately severed and flew several meters across the store and huddled for safety in the furthest corner of the room, no doubt the most comfortable it had been all day.

   This is a blatant lie, but illustrates, I think, the effect of the shoes perfectly in both semantic and picturesque terms. Fucking ow.

   When the full force and weight of my womanhood hit these bad boys it was clear that they simply had not been built to withstand anything past a Selma Hayek say, or perhaps an America Ferrera. I am more what you might call The South Americas, or American Airlines, but a Ferrera I am not, so off they flew and out we swandove.
   The highlight of the whole adventure came by the time we were desperate enough to try Milady's on the way out of the mall, making our way back to the general direction of the car. We looked at the shoe rack wasting no time, being rather expert and well-oiled at this by now, but highly fatigued and explosively wired the way only frat boys get after staying up for a week drinking espressos and energy drinks on a dare. We scan the rack and spy a perfect pair: red, very minimal heels, sandal-ish but really more or less ok. This is what we call perfect, you see. We could have sung. I think we might have sung a little. We elatedly- perhaps even a little overzealously- accost a saleslady and ask for a pair in a size 8, to which she encouragingly does not slap us in the face with a fawn-skin glove with utter disgust but disappears into the back to presumably retrieve said 8s.
   "I'm sorry, it seems we only have them in a size 5." WHAT? WHYYYYYYYY?????!!! LADY, we have been walking around for four and a half hours of my short life looking at shoes and shoes and shoes. They all look a-motherfucking-like to me to start with, but by now I couldn't pick the pair that assaulted me in Meltz out of a line-up. These were perfect, sort of, and came out of no where as if by providence, yet now you flout destiny and all poetic narrative by FUCKING TELLING ME YOU HAVE ONLY UP TO A SIZE 5?!
   My mother is a trooper, and instead of having a nervous breakdown like me, she starts scouring their rack for something else, determined to find that elusive shoe. We have begun lowering standards here so fast it's like the floodgates, but she just knows it in her bones that she's going to find that shoe. She grabs at a pair like a frenzied beast and holds them up-

   And says: "Wat van hierdie paar? Hulle het nou wel 'n trossie..."
   Which, for those of you fine people who don't speak Afrikaans, very, very loosely translates to "What about this pair? True, they do have a little {grape} cluster..."
   I'm so sorry, it's just not as ball-crackingly funny in English as it is in Afrikaans. Nothing I can do about that, the word for a bunch or cluster of grapes in Afrikaans just sounds inherently dirty, a fact I never realised until now. It's just that at that precise moment, standing there, exhausted and having lost all faith in survival beyond the carpark, ready to cry conspiracy and really just to cry, this was one of the funniest things any human being has said, ever. We both started to laugh so hard we couldn't breath. Tears were streaming down our faces, I was hanging off of the sales racks, a little bit of pee literally came out. Try as we might, we could not stop laughing. People were starting to look at us and see us for the miscreant vagrants we were, and we just could not be arsed to care.

   We came home having found no shoes, and I decided fuck that, this is not Lady Di's fucking wedding, I'm going in my gladiator sandals and that's that. They are dressy simply because they are not my aforementioned crocs, and I think at this point Estelle will be thankful enough that I'm not pitching in my PJ's with cold cream all over my face to write me a note attached to a muffin basket. I shall be snapping pics with my new instant camera (which my awesome dad got me for my birthday) at the wedding, so I shall post pics. Here are some that have happened already:

Estelle, taken on my pending-brother-in-law Barend's birthday a little while back.

Dad-Chill-A-Lot.

I'm boogeying here, in case you think me simply mad. I'm that too, but not for this particular moment. 

Cousin Carla and attaché Peter. Carla has read one of my blog posts- the one entitled "Only The Very Best Penis For Me" and was greatly tickled. Now she brings it up as often and as loudly as she can. Bless.



   So you see, unlike all you posers with your instamatic apps to make your pictures look like they were taken twenty years ago, I have a whole camera that does that for me. And a few apps on my phone. Damnit. I always give the game away, curse my ever vigilant honest streak.

   I had a few visitations the last while, ingoing and out. Dirk came to visit me, and I ventured out to visit Brenda and bebe Sam. Both were excellent. Dirk sat on my bed and did the little Brad Pitt dance from Burn After Reading, which is a mental image I shall return to rather often with great pleasure and glee, and I assured him that in my mind there is a Friends reference or quote for absolutely every life experience ever. Dirk, in case you were wondering, the shoe adventure has two.

   "Ugely shoes, ugely shoes, ugely shoes..." Then of course there's a whole episode where Monica suffers under the oppressive reign of the gorgeous bank-breaking boots she bought and had to pretend were worth it. LAWYERED.

   Baby Sam has gotten so big- he's over 8 kilograms now, and so freakin' beautiful. That app I was deriding and loftily having my high horse pee all the fuck over a few paragraphs ago? Yeah, I abused it a little.

   He was brilliant, and fascinated by my thin, stringy-ass hair. If I let it brush over his face he spasmed in ecstatic delight and demanded more. Also: kid knows what cleavage is for. He's an experienced little milk-sucker by now, and he focuses like a laser beam when the headlights are brought out.
   Nothing cuter than a blonde in a onesie.

   Before I love and leave you, I must ask- have you guys given any thought to what your effort would be to give me a middle name? I'm thinking about the best ways to publicise this and start the auction, cause I'm actually starting to look forward to it. If I were you, I'd get the creative juices flowing early and start putting away all your spare change now, cause Cousin Carla has already said she's intending to invoke a hyphen and some serious consonant abuse if she has her way.