I went out for boots under forty pounds and came back with strong opinions about Alabama.
MANCHESTER, England – Saturday began with a plan, a budget and a promise to my bank. The plan was to find a pair of cowboy boots. The budget was forty pounds. The promise was that I would stop referring to the boots as “an investment”, which I have said so often that my bank has started to reply.
Shop one, the hospice charity shop
I took my friend Tamsin, who comes shopping the way a lifeguard goes swimming: to watch, and to intervene only in an emergency. The first shop had a boot section the size of a doormat, containing one pair of wellingtons, one pair of ballet slippers and one pair of tan leather boots with a Cuban heel and a tiny tooled flower on each toe.
They were thirty-five pounds. They were also half a size too small, a fact I discovered after I had put them on and told a volunteer called Maureen, with great warmth, that they were “meant for me”. Maureen looked at my face, then at the boots, then at the clock, and said, “Love, they were meant for someone with a smaller problem.”
Shop two, the vintage rail
The second shop sold everything with a fringe, including, I think, a lampshade. The boots here were forty-five pounds, which is above budget in the same way the moon is above Salford. Tamsin held up a pair and said, “These look like they have been to Nashville,” and I said, “They look like they have been to a karaoke bar in Nashville.”
The prices were on my mind because of the thing I had read on the tram, which I will now share, as promised in my contract with The London Prat, where a diary is supposed to contain an actual news item rather than only my feelings about footwear.
Lunch, in which I read about a beach
Morgan Wallen’s Sand In My Boots festival is coming back to Gulf Shores, Alabama, on 21 to 23 May next year, and a local news report on the 2027 line-up says Wallen, Kings of Leon and Ella Langley are the headliners. There was also a presale for local residents, which opened on Thursday afternoon and closed on Friday morning, available only to people in listed zip codes in Florida and in Baldwin and Mobile counties in Alabama.
I do not live in Baldwin or Mobile. I live above a vape shop in a building where the heating has opinions. So I did what any normal person does and read the reaction, and Saving Country Music’s take on the festival ticket prices carries a headline calling them ridiculous. I did not read the figures, because I was eating a sausage roll and I try to keep my heart rate out of the red zone.
Here is the thing about paying festival money for a beach. I own a pair of trainers that have been to a beach. They were free and the beach was Blackpool.
The grievance ledger
By the afternoon, I had a list in my notes app. Here it is as submitted:
- Boots that fit are priced as though they were hand-stitched by a Tuscan master
- Boots that are cheap were clearly designed for a smaller and angrier foot
- Tamsin saying “they all look the same” in a tone I can only call Northern
- A fringe jacket that smelled of a bonfire from another century
- Paying festival money to sit near sand when I already own sand, in a pencil case, from a holiday
Prices come up in country music a lot, mostly in the sense that people sing about not having any. I did notice that a farming site had a headline on the subject, Rural Voters’ Breaking Point Sits Below Cost of Production, and I thought, yes, same, and my breaking point also sits below the cost of production, with the production being me.
Shop three, the one that sold me the boots
On the way home, we found a little shop under the railway arches that sells things from clearances. A man with a clipboard and a cardigan held up a pair of dark brown boots, a proper pair, scuffed but sensible, with a heel that would not take my ankle out at a line dance. They were thirty-eight pounds. They fit. I nearly wept on the clipboard.
I wore them out of the shop and straight into the rain, which is the traditional way. The line dance class at the church hall behind the bus depot is on Tuesday, and I will be walking in like a woman who has been to Alabama, even though the nearest I have come is the second half of a documentary.
Home, with a cup of tea and an opinion
My flatmates asked what the boots cost and I said “thirty-eight pounds and a bit of my dignity”, and Marcie said, “That seems fair for boots.” I put them by the radiator to dry and they steamed like a small horse.
My editor runs the website that employs me and insists there is a sensible way to work out when a headline is real, which is why I have bookmarked a UK checklist for sorting real news from comedy and why I checked every figure in this entry twice. If you want to read more of my daily notes at The London Prat, they get more footwear-based by the week.
I am going to go and stand in the kitchen in my new boots, quite still, like a statue of someone who has solved a problem.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/