Buying casual sports footwear is a veritable minefield and I freely admit that I actually get scared when it comes to buying trainers. In fact it would perhaps be less painful if my feet were cut off in some freak gardening digging accident to prevent me from ever having to face another trainer shopping trip ever again.
Of course, it used to be so much easier...
As a small child growing up in Yorkshire there were three choices when it came to buying trainers: white Green Flash, black Adidas with leather uppers and the ubiquitous black pumps used by schoolchildren for games (or PE as it was later rebranded to make games teaching a slightly less laughable profession).
And for many including myself this was still a trainer choice too many but at least it was manageable. Now however...
I have to enter a huge chain store pumping out looped Missy Elliott tracks with walls covered in different makes, colours and styles of trainer. There are trainers for football, skateboarding, tennis, running, basketball, climbing, kicking... The list is endless and to the uninitiated like myself it’s frightening and intimidating – and that’s before I have to attract the attention of some surly youth who’s less interested in being there than I am to actually try to buy a pair.
I thought I had this cracked yesterday as I’d decided on a new trainer policy which was to buy the simplest-looking, logo-less black trainers in the store. Sadly the only one answering this description was also the pair purchased by my teenage stepson several weeks before and I couldn’t possibly inflict on him the indignity of a hugely unfashionable 36-year-old man wearing the same footwear as him (especially after the jockstrap incident).
But I’m planning on doing some gardening when I get home so if the spade’s sharp enough my dilemma may soon be at an end...
