A mile in someone else’s shoes

IWAS amused by Jonathan Self’s story about his grandfather, who commissioned enormous shoes in case his offspring’s feet were even bigger than his own (Spectator, March 30). When he needed new football boots in the 1930s, my 6ft 5in father would buy the biggest pair he could find, force in his feet, then sit with them in a bowl of warm water in the hope of stretching them. With ordinary shoes, I think he accepted that stretching new ones by wearing them was simply a fact of life.

He still insisted on buying size-12 shoes, even when bigger ones became freely available.

Stephen Shaw, Nottinghamshire