A date with Sarah-Kate NAIL VANISH!

Her holiday trek left Sarah-Kate on the back foot

It’s often not until something’s gone that you realise how much you liked having it in the first place. Boyfriends sometimes fit into this category, as do grumpy cats. Or old coats with bobbles and no buttons but, as it turns out, the right everything else.

Toenails also leave a rather large gap once they’re gone, something I’m currently in the process of discovering. My sporty summer hike of the Milford Track, which 99.6% of my body adored, was unfortunately rejected by my two biggest and littlest toenails.

My boots were not new, nor too small, but on one very wet day, the water sloshed in and sluiced about my tootsies so much that during the subsequent long descent from the track’s highest point, my nails decided they were not up for this lark.

By the bottom of the hill, they were not happy. By the middle of the following day, neither was I. Still, I limped to the end of this iconic walk, high-fived the Ginger, then got in a helicopter and flew to the nearest doctor’s surgery. The diagnosis: ouch.

It’s not that uncommon to lose toenails, although it most often happens to marathon runners, according to the doctor, so it’s something of an unhappy miracle it happened to me. “Repeated trauma” to the toes was the culprit and I should not expect to enjoy a pedicure any time soon.

That actually didn’t bother me too much because part of failing to appreciate my toenails in the first place meant I was about six months overdue for a pedicure anyway. I’d been going DIY on that front after figuring out that if I looked at my toes without my glasses on from a distance of about 175cm (my height), they didn’t look too bad if I’d painted them myself and I didn’t have to spend the time having someone else do it.

Colour was soon not an issue. I’ll spare you most of the gory details, but the offending nails quickly turned a variety of purples and blues. Then the two littlies fell off, followed by one biggie and eventually the other. I’m not particularly squeamish, but there’s something very not right about a big toe with no nail on it. It looks like a newborn baby. And what don’t you cover a newborn baby with? A shoe.

So here’s the clincher – nail-- less toes do not like to be incarcerated. It feels icky when anything super-soft touches them, let alone anything itchy and scratchy or tough as, literally, old boots.

In the days since my nails abandoned me, I have been reduced to wearing a single solitary pair of clunky Birkenstock sandals, bought specially, since I’m not a fan of the German Jesus boot as a rule – they are the opposite of chic.

Yet these cork-soled foot barges have saved my life. I’ve worn them to a wedding, to Sydney, around the South Island, in the city, on the beach ... they’ve basically gone wherever my legs are. But when my toenails grow back, those Birkenstocks are going in the bin and I’m throwing my feet a “Welcome back, I love you” party.