I can’t help playing the heel

With

THIS IS A TALE where I “stick the boot in”. Not, as you would expect with common usage of such language these days, into some poor unfortunate deserving of my wrath, but literally, into a box destined for a charity shop.

And I can guarantee when you reach the end of today’s piece you will be pointing at your partner and saying “This is you!”.

Odds are they will be doing the same thing right back at you.

It all started while I was helping Mrs P make the bed and tidy the bedroom. Naturally, because we are normal people, there were some items of clothes sitting on a washing basket in the corner to be to put away.

While Mrs P had her wardrobe door open I happened to glance in. Then I uttered a phrase I’m sure you have all used before at some stage: “Geez, you’ve got a lot of shoes . . . ”.

I would like to point out at this point

I try my best to be a, shall we say, “modern” man; if Mrs P wants 26 pairs of shoes then it’s 100 per cent her call. Unfortunately, the hard-wiring in my brain has provided me with a man’s outlook, which centres around practicality rather than anything else. I mean how can you wear 26 pairs at one time? Surely it’s better to be practical, get rid of some and make more space in the wardrobe. Isn’t it? At this point I’ll move the story on a bit.

Let’s just say Mrs P has an opinion that suggests, for her, 26 pairs is “about right” and before I started suggesting she get rid of any of them maybe I should start thinking about getting rid of all those things in the garage I keep which are, in her view, “ridiculous”. I should say here that any bloke involved in a bit of DIY knows the minute you get shot of “that” piece of wood you’ve kept in a pile for the past 10 years you are going to need something exactly that size for your current project. But I digress.

So, we did the old to and fro thing for a while before finally, and sensibly, deciding we should both go through our wardrobes and see if there was anything to give to charity.

We found plenty. Shirts I hadn’t worn since Winston first got into Parliament. A T-shirt Mrs P wore in mourning the day Rod married Rachel. Heaps of stuff. Order was restored.

But the shoes kept bugging me.

So I got online when we took a break and asked some friends how many pairs of shoes they owned. Eventually I got 80-odd replies. You should try it. The results may surprise you.

One of my friends has 100 pairs. She keeps some in a wardrobe and some under her bed. She was top in the women’s list ahead of 87 (a friend in Australia), then 51 and several others in the 30 to 40 range. On the bloke side, one fella blew us all away with

30. The rest were in the single digits. For myself, I managed seven, though

I don’t know how I managed to collect that many to be honest.

I said as much to Mrs P in the garage later as we were putting the charity clothes in boxes and rationally discussing the “survey”.

I am ashamed to admit the hardwiring got the better of me and a little “dig” flew forth unintentionally (honest) from my big gob.

As I said it, Mrs P picked up an empty box and there, sitting neatly lined up, just in case I ever needed them, were five pairs of old golf shoes.

It goes without saying if her satisfied smirk made a noise you would have heard it from your place.