The agony of the feet

Tony Deyal, Contributor

"Just now you will start to wear the shoebox," my father said drily as I told him that my school shoes were "too tight" for me and that I had to get a new pair. Poor man (in every sense)! He wore the same Size 7 for most of his life and I was able to fit into his shoes for a brief three-month period when I was about 12. Maybe that is why I was never tempted to follow in his footsteps. I have, however, gone to great lengths. I reached Size 12 extra wide before you could say, "Hush Puppy". Another of my friends quipped, "Boy, when you want to turn, you will have to go by the roundabout."

One day in maths class when we were learning how to find the area of irregular shapes, my teacher, who normally was blind to all our pranks and note-passing, made his first joke. Unfortunately, and much to the delight of the other boys, it was at my expense. He quipped, "The biggest challenge you will have with an irregular shape is Deyal's foot. The only advice I can give you is that while it is normally safe to assume that three feet make a yard, in his case it is only two feet."

I stopped feeling self-conscious about my foot size when a friend asked me about my shoe size. When I replied, "Twelve, extra wide," she looked at me knowingly and said, "Hmm." Now, there is 'hmm' as in speculation and 'hmm' as in confirmation. In fact, there are many lists of things that make people go 'hmm', and what follows is a mere sampling.

After eating, do amphibians have to wait one hour before getting out of the water? After they make Styrofoam, what do they ship it in? Are part-time bandleaders semi-conductors? Are you telling the truth if you lie in bed? Before they invented drawing boards, what did they go back to? Can you buy an entire chess set in a pawnshop? Shouldn't blind dogs have seeing-eye humans? Do cemetery workers prefer the graveyard shift? Do crematoriums give discounts to burn victims?

Do fish get thirsty? Do hungry crows have ravenous appetites? Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery? Do people in Australia call the rest of the world 'up over'? Do television evange-lists do more than lay people? Do you need a silencer if you are going to shoot a mime? Does an analyst have to be anal? My favourite is, "What's the synonym for thesaurus?"

footloose

I must say that the 'hmm' cheered me up no end. It made me feel footloose and fancy-free. However, it led to another question even more intriguing, "Do big feet really mean more than just a large shoe size?" Even when Snopes.com debunked that particular myth, I still cherish the lift that it gives me when someone, other than Clarks, is interested in the size of my feet. Snopes took all the fun out of having big, wide feet when it revealed, "A long-lived mistaken belief relates penis size to a visible body part: hand, foot or nose ... . However, in a study published in the October 2002 issue of the British Journal of Urology International, researchers found that the size of a man's feet does not correlate to the size of his penis." The researchers, urologists at the St Mary's Hospital and University College Hospital in London, went to great lengths (and less) to come up with the conclusive statement, "There is no scientific support for this relationship."

It is possible that this news would be greeted with another speculative 'hmm' by persons who are interested in a young Morocco-born man, now living in France, who wears European-size 58 shoes and is recognised by the Guinness Book of World Records as having the biggest feet in the world. Twenty-nine-year-old Brahim Takioullah is more than eight feet (246cm) tall and has record-breaking feet and feats - his left measures one foot, three inches (38.1cm) in length and his right, one foot, 2.76 inches.

experience

It is true that size is not everything, as the lesson of the Titanic amply demonstrated, but my own experience is that it can be both a hindrance and a help, depending on the circumstances. While travelling to Montreal for a climate-change conference, I was in the aisle of an emergency row and slipped out of my Size 12 extra wide Clarks while I napped. The woman in the seat next to me did not want to wake me, so she tried to slip past between my feet and the row in front of us. Unfortunately for her, she did not see my shoes on the ground. I woke up to the clatter and the crash. She never returned to that seat and was upgraded to first class by a solicitous stewardess so she could nurse her wounds in peace.

But in Montreal, the way from my hotel to the convention centre was down a slight incline. Freezing rain had fallen the night before and my first steps as I hit the pavement were not steps as we know them. I was skating on thin ice. However, my big feet saved the day and possibly my life. My extra-wide Clarks, which had been such an embarrassment on the plane, were like a pair of skis. If my feet were smaller, I would probably have bounced my head on the concrete or brick sidewalk. As it was, I slalomed straight into the convention hall. Had I a ski-dometer, it would have registered speeds, if not faster than light, at least faster than sound.

Despite the debunking of the endowment myth, I also take pride in the way feet have been given their due in our language and life. Sherlock Holmes said, "The game's afoot." The most popular game is football. And had I not made it on time and in one piece for the conference, I can just imagine limping in late and my boss, on hearing my explanation, saying, "Tony, that's a lame excuse."

Tony Deyal was last seen saying as a footnote he is not as bad as the grouchy centipede who complained, "I just hate it when I start the day on the wrong foot."