Shoes

You see them from time to time. Discarded, desolate, destitute. Unloved, unwanted, untied. But most of all, alone.

Shoes, or rather, a solo, solitary, single shoe by the side of the road. Why is there only one? Where is its partner, its mirror image. The flop to its flip. Its solemate.

And how did it get there? You can almost imagine a pair of shoes anthropomorphised, and hitting the road, but not a lone shoe. How would a single shoe walk anywhere?

I have had my suspicions of a shoe planter. A madman driving the length of the country throwing single shoes out of his window at random, laughing hysterically. Just to drive me as mad as he. But then I've seen shoes by the road in Japan. There are shoes by the road elsewhere too, so it must be something else.

A wise man once told me that before you insult a man, you should walk a mile in his shoes, because then you're a mile away. And you have his shoes. Perhaps the next step is then to discard his shoes separately by the side of the road.

The most common explanations I've found are that the shoe became tragically involved in an in-car incident, perhaps at the mercy of an over excited dog, or small child, and then was rapidly discarded, ejected through a passenger window.

The alternative is that the shoes were placed on the roof of the car, and then as the car gathered speed they flew off. If you think about it, this makes sense. Even if they left the roof at the same time the chances of the shoes landing together must be minute, so one lands where you see it, and the other disappears into the central reservation, the shrubbery, the path of an oncoming car to be bounced over lanes of road.

So the next time you see a sad sole by the side of the road, and wonder, how'd it get there, you'll know.

It was me, chucking it out of my car at random, just to drive you mad.