5 Reasons I Stopped Planning My Day Around My Feet

1. Two places a shoe has to make room. Everyone only does one.

The toe box is real and it matters. 40 odd years of shoes that narrow to a point does something to your toes — mine lean in, the second one sits up on the first, and by lunchtime the ball of my foot burns. Room across the front fixed that, and I'm not going to pretend it didn't.

But it only fixed half of it.

Because I don't just hurt at the toes. I hurt across the top of my foot. The instep, where the shoe goes over. That's where the mark is when I take them off at night. And no amount of room at the front does anything about that, because the pressure isn't coming from the sides.

It's coming down from above.

Which is also — and this is the bit that annoyed me — why the wide ones let me down.

A wide shoe is wider at the bottom. Wider sole, more room across the ball. Genuinely useful if you're broad. But a foot that's fuller by the end of the day isn't just wider, it's bigger in every direction. Including up. And up is the one direction nobody builds for.

So I'd buy the wide pair, and it'd be roomier round the edges, and the lid still came down on top of my foot exactly like before.

4 pairs of that.

These do both. Foot-shaped at the front so the toes sit flat and stay there. And nothing across the top — one piece of soft knit that lies over your foot instead of pulling across it.

First day I wore them I kept waiting for the 4pm pain to start. It just didn't.

2. Every slip-on squeezes. That's not bad luck — it's how they stay on.

Nobody told me this and I'm still slightly cross about it.

A lace-up stays on because of the laces. A shoe with a strap stays on because of the strap.

A slip-on has neither. So the only thing keeping it on your foot is tension across the top.

Which means it has to be built tighter than your foot and rely on the stretch to hold. The squeeze isn't a flaw in the pair you bought. It isn't your feet either. The squeeze is the fastening. That's the whole job it's doing.

And it presses hardest exactly where it presses — the widest, highest part. The part that's fullest at four in the afternoon.

Once I understood that, the six pairs made sense. They weren't bad shoes. They were all doing the same thing the same way, and the only difference was how hard they gripped. Grip harder, it hurts. Grip less, it slides off your heel. There's nothing in between, which is why you can look for six years and not find it.

These hold at the heel. The elastic sits round the back, where your foot is narrow and doesn't really change through the day. The front carries nothing.

Same job, different place. That's it. That's the whole difference.

3. Loose enough to be comfortable.

Here's the thing nobody warns you about with roomy shoes.

The second a shoe has real room in it, it can start moving on you. I had a pair like that once — went on beautifully, then slid about on my heel, and I never wore them out of the house again. And if you've started paying any attention to your footing on a wet floor, that's not a small thing to get wrong.

So there's a soft cord across the top with a little toggle. Not to squeeze your foot — to hold the shoe steady while your foot has all the room it wants.

That's the difference, and it took me a minute to get my head round it. On a normal slip-on, the tight bit is what's holding the shoe on, so it has to be tight or the shoe comes off. Here the knit is doing the room and the cord is doing the holding. Two jobs, two separate parts. Neither one fighting the other.

Set it once, roughly, and mostly leave it. On a day when my feet are fuller I give it a bit of slack, which takes about two seconds and I do it sitting down with a cup of tea. Most days I don't touch it.

Room where you need it. Held where you don't.

4. No bending, no laces, no shoehorn.

No laces. No sitting on the end of the bed working a heel in.

The opening is wider than the widest part of your foot, so you step in and that's it. Which sounds like a small thing until you've had a morning where getting your shoes on left you slightly out of breath before anything had actually happened yet.

My sister-in-law bought me one of those long shoehorns a few years ago. Well meant. I used it every day and hated it a bit every day.

The sole grips too, which I hadn't thought to care about until I did — wet tile, the ramp at the surgery, the wooden steps out the back.

5. They don't look like shoes for someone with foot trouble.

I want to be honest about why I put up with sore feet for six years.

The comfortable shoes were beige. Beige, or white with a thick sole, and they looked like the shoes in the leaflet that comes through the door about stairlifts. I'd rather have had a bad afternoon than look like I'd packed it in. Which is probably not sensible. I don't think I'm the only one.

These just look like shoes. Plain knit, ordinary shape, colours that go with what's already in the wardrobe. I've worn them to lunch, on a plane, round a garden centre and to my niece's thing in September, and not one person has mentioned them.

Getting older is going to do plenty. It doesn't also get to pick my shoes.