Deputy Features Editor Sue Brattle says she is learning to like being in the dusty footwear crowd
I have started to judge people by their shoes. This is a Dubai thing and is nothing to do with whether the shoes are designer, hand-stitched, or any of that stuff. This is about sand and dust.
I leave my home with pristine shoes every morning; three minutes later they have their first assault as I wade through the sand on the plot of land where I park my car.
As I start the engine, I now automatically shake each foot but the sand still lodges between my toes.
Then I arrive at work, in an office wedged between two cement factories. Cement dust, I have learned, sticks to everything more than sand does. It also leaves a sort of grey-ish layer over everything it comes in contact with, which five days a week includes me.
So now, when I am out and about in the Emirates, the first thing I notice is peoples' shoes. If they are shiny and their feet look clean, I imagine they lead a lifestyle that involves pristine parking areas and an immaculate office.
"So why," someone asked me last week, "don't you just keep a clean pair of shoes in your car and change into them when you get wherever it is you're going?" That is such a good and practical (and obvious) idea that I didn't like to tell her why I can't do that.
It's because, wherever I go, I know I would end up wearing the wrong shoes.
Just last week, I was out somewhere and looked down to see, to my horror, that I was still wearing the battered old pair of flip-flops I use to go to the beach. It's the reason I have never been one of those people with a pair of driving shoes in the boot.
Instead, all of my shoes have little chips on the heels where they get scraped on the footwell of the car as I operate the brake and accelerator.
In the scheme of things, this is a problem so minute that you may think it's not worth going on about. However, I have reached the conclusion that the "driving shoes in the boot" type of people are possibly life's winners, even though I find them rather irritating.
This issue has very little to do with shoes and is all about presence of mind; when I reach my destination, I tend to jump out of the car and get going straightaway. Hence getting halfway through the day before I realised I had my oldest flip-flops on.
Really smart people have a coat hanger and clothes brush on the back seat, shoes in the boot, and probably a change of clothes somewhere. Nothing will ever catch them unawares.
However, you may not be surprised to read that I am learning to like being in the dusty shoes crowd. They're a bit like smokers; if you don't smoke, you always imagine the smokers get the best of the gossip when they go out of the office for a cigarette break.
Those of us with dirty shoes, I like to think, have the same cachet.When I look down and see the tell-tale layer of muck on someone's feet, or the slick of dust on the back of their trouser legs where they've tried to clean their shoes, my heart warms to them.
But just recently, I've decided to have a dusty foot in both camps; I stayed at a hotel and there was one of those disposable shoe cleaning sponge thingys in my room. I keep it in my handbag now. Whether or not I have the presence of mind to use it is another question entirely.
© Emirates Today 2007
