I was going to write this blog all about the amazing shoes know as Doc Martins – Docs for short. And how wonderful they are and how I can pretty much mark my life by the pairs I’ve owned… but I forgot their one very negative effect on my life… blisters!
Mind you, I get blisters from almost every pair of shoes I buy – I have strange shaped feet, so maybe it’s not such a hard thing to write after all. It’s just that, because they last so ruddy long and are so ruddy well made, Docs give me blisters for a hell of a lot longer than any other shoes … anywoo, here goes.
It was in Year 7 or 8 or 9, I can’t remember, that I finally acquired my first pair of Docs. They were made in New Zealand, and were a slightly different shape from everyone else’s (and cheaper, which is why mum bought them for me), but I remember being ecstatic that I had finally joined the ‘in’ crowed with Doc ownership. Of course, I was never an ‘in’ person, but I felt closer to the beautiful people by owning them. And they were a very good investment too; they lasted me for 7 years. They were very comfortable (once I broke them in), very solid and sturdy and I wore them every day, until they finally disintegrated.
After that, I bought a pair of good English docs. They were my first professional shoes if you will. I coloured in the yellow stitching so I could wear them to work and in gang show. They were really good shoes, and I think I had them for five years, but it took me two years of that to break them in! They were stolen from the back of my car at age five, so I’ll never know exactly how long they would have lasted. They were also very comfortable towards the end.
At age of 21ish, during my alternative university faze (it wasn’t much of one, but I did it anyhow), I bought a pair of 18 hole docs. I felt amazingly gothic wearing them, but they weren’t the best pair I’ve ever owned. They were Australian, and the leather wasn’t that good – it tended to crack and craze, and isn’t smooth any more, and they weren’t as comfortable as the other pairs… probably because I never properly broke them in. I still have them back home, but very rarely wore them. Mind you, I could still wear them now, they haven’t died or anything.
Next, after I had moved to Canberra, I bought another professional pair to replace the English one’s I’d lost. My second professional life if you will. They were Australian again. But this time… well, they are still back home too. I lived in Canberra for five years and I never managed to break them in! The problem was that I could only wear them once and then had to take two to three weeks off to recover from the blisters. I got rather board of that after a while, and so didn’t commit to the break in, so they are still almost as good as new.
Anyway, now we come to the present, and the reason I thought of writing this blog in the first place. I’m over here in England, where Docs come from, and suddenly they made sense to me. Those non-slip soles work in a place where autumn leaves become deadly slime and the attached tongues are a very useful invention where puddles are a fact of life. So I thought to myself, well, why not buy a pair of docs? They could be very good wet weather shoes and heaven knows there is a lot of wet weather over here. So I did – I bought my first ever eight hole pair Docs. These ones are made in China, the doc manufacture having been out sourced some time ago. It’s funny really; it’s the quintessential English shoe and I’ve bought five pairs now but the only pair of actual English doc’s I owned were the one’s that were stolen.
I did remember that I have difficulty breaking Docs in, so I was smart… I bought a soft pair. Unlike every other pair I’ve owned, this pair do not have the harder-than-steel leather of the original docs, but are malleable and supple. They still have the non-slip sole, the attached tongue, and hopefully, the durability of the original, but without the stiffness. And so I thought, these ones would be less likely to give me blisters, right?
Wrong.
Ah well. They are still good shoes and they do keep my feet dry on the one day out of the fortnight I can wear them. And when I have broken them in (which I might just do before I leave England, but I somehow doubt it) they will hopefully become as comfortable as my first ones…
Sigh.
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