A letter from a reader

At 65, my friend watched me change my shoes in the car park before we went in. I have been doing that since I was twenty-five.

You should picture me writing this at the kitchen table with a cup of tea going cold beside me, because that is exactly how slowly it has come. I am not a writer, and what another woman has on her feet has never been any of my business.

But four women have asked me about these in the last fortnight, two of them at the same lunch, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it all down properly.

It started with Bev, in a car park in Claremont, on the way to a lunch for somebody’s retirement. I had driven in the comfortable ones, as I always do, and when we pulled up I reached into the footwell behind my seat for the other pair, as I always do, and sat there with the door open swapping them over. She watched the whole operation from the passenger seat. Then she said it.

You have been carrying two pairs of shoes everywhere you go for as long as I have known you. That is forty years of changing in car parks.

I laughed, and then I sat there with one shoe on and one shoe off, and she was right. Forty years. There is a pair in the footwell of the car right now. There is a pair in a bag by the front door. I have never once left the house with the shoes I intended to be seen in already on my feet, because the shoes I can walk in and the shoes I can be seen in have never been the same shoes.

I did not decide to spend forty years carrying a second pair of shoes. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides that. It happens quietly, one pair at a time, until a friend is watching you do it in a car park and saying the number out loud.

How it happens

When I actually went looking for one pair that could do both jobs, I understood how I had ended up with two.

The shops give you two choices. There are the good shoes, which look like something and which I can manage for about ninety minutes before I start planning my route around where there is somewhere to sit down. And there are the comfortable ones, which are white, or beige, or white and beige, and which announce from thirty feet away that comfort was the only thing anybody was thinking about.

Smart or walkable. That was the whole shopping centre. Nobody seemed to think a woman might want a shoe she can be on her feet in all day and also quite like the look of.

And once that is all there is, you stop expecting anything else. You buy the good pair for the occasion. You buy the comfortable pair for the getting there. You put one of them in the car, and you assume that is simply what having feet at sixty-five is.

What I had wrong

Here is the bit I got most wrong, and I suspect I am not alone.

I thought my problem was that comfortable shoes are ugly and there is nothing to be done about it. I had made my peace with it. I had a system, and the system worked, and the system involved a bag by the door for four decades.

It turns out it was never about comfortable shoes being ugly.

It is about what the comfort is built out of. If the cushioning is in the sole, where you cannot see it, the shoe above it can look like anything it likes. It is only when the comfort has to be visible — the wide white toe, the thick strap, the great chunk of foam up the side — that you end up with a shoe that is clearly a medical decision. Put the soft part underneath and the top of the shoe is free to be a plain, ordinary, good-looking sneaker.

It took me until 65, and one shoe on and one shoe off in a car park, to work that out.

The sneakers are called the Rosie

They are from Perth Boutique, a small Australian boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. Bev found them, which she reminds me of regularly.

They are called the Rosie. A plain, low sneaker on a soft cushioned sole, which the boutique describes as orthopaedic cushioning, and which from the outside simply looks like a tidy shoe. Mine are the beige. There are fourteen colours, which is not a number I have ever been offered in a shoe before.

The sole is the part that matters. It is soft and it is cushioned the whole way along, so standing about at a lunch for three hours is a different experience from standing about in the good shoes. They are light, which I did not expect from a sole that thick, and that is most of why I forget I have them on. And the top of the shoe is plain and low and quiet, so nothing about them says the word comfort out loud.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is the soft part put somewhere you cannot see it.

What happened at the next lunch

The first proper outing was a seventieth in Cottesloe, three weeks later, which was four hours and most of it on my feet.

Three women asked me about them before the cake. The woman next to me started it, because she said she had been looking for something she could wear all day and had more or less given up.

The third was Lorraine, who I have known for twenty years and who has never once commented on anything I wear. She looked down and asked whether they were new. I have decided to take that as a compliment, because what she did not ask was whether my feet were all right.

What I noticed more than the questions, though, was the car. I got in, and I drove home, and I did not change. There was nothing in the footwell to change into, because there was no reason for it to be there, which I had not realised had been a small ritual at the start and end of every single outing for forty years until it stopped.

The next morning I put them straight back on to walk down for the paper. Same shoes, nothing in a bag by the door. Completely myself.

Three things I have learned since

One. The comfort should be under the foot, not on display. Every comfortable shoe I have owned announced itself. Put the soft part in the sole and the rest of the shoe is free to be plain, and plain is all I ever wanted.

Two. One pair is lighter than two in more ways than one. No bag by the door, nothing in the footwell, no five minutes at either end of an outing. I had stopped counting the ritual because it had been there so long.

Three. Fourteen colours means you can have the boring ones. I went for the beige and I am looking at the black. The point of fourteen is not the yellow. It is that the ones that go with everything are in there too.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Rosie is $70.95. It was $177.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid more than that for each of the two pairs I was carrying around, and between them they still could not do the one job.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no middleman taking a cut, and they have their end of season sale on at the moment, which on these is sixty per cent off, with free shipping Australia wide.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and had a proper look before I ordered. Fourteen colours, and the sizes run from a 5 to a 12, all at the same price. I will say plainly that I ordered my usual size and they fit, but shoes are shoes, and there is a thirty day money-back guarantee if they do not, which is the only reason I pressed the button on a shoe I had not had on my foot.

Then I started looking at the black ones, which Bev says was entirely predictable.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat in the kitchen with the teapot between us and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If there is a bag by your front door with a second pair of shoes in it, or a pair in the footwell of your car, and you have long since stopped thinking of that as odd, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a pair of shoes will change your life. They will not. But there is something in walking into a room in the shoes you drove there in that I had quietly given up on, and I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on at the moment, and the free shipping goes with it. And it is the beige and the black that go first, which I found out because Bev had to wait a week for hers.

I have not changed my shoes in a car park since.

Maggie