Saturday, June the 11th, 2005

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A Bag on Your Foot

Wearing a bag on your foot is an effective way of stopping water leaking into your boot. Such a disaster can occur when the sole of your boot is pitted with holes and you step inadvertently into a puddle of rainwater which has fallen out of the sky. The sole of your boot may be so pitted because it is old and worn, or it may be that the holes appeared all together, of a sudden, for example if your boot came into contact with an industrial hole-punch. Whatever the cause of the holes in the sole of your boot, which will allow water to seep into your sock, you will be very careful to watch out for puddles of rainwater, and other watery dangers, such as duckponds and the sea. But I would argue that it is a near certainty your vigilance will not be so acute as to withstand the unexpected. You may be hailed by an acquaintance aboard a passing bus with a top deck open to the elements. A klaxon may sound. You may be temporarily blinded by a mysterious hovering ball of incandescent light. In these hypothetical cases, and numerous others, your holed boot may splash into a body of water and your sock will become drenched, as will your foot, as likely as not, for it is rare for a sock to be watertight in this country.

That is why a bag worn on your foot, over your boot of course, can be such a boon. A judiciously chosen bag will stop water entering the holes in the sole of your boot and soaking into your sock, making your foot wet. We all know what happened to those poor terrified soldiers cowering in trenches during the Great War. Let us take precautions not available to them. Remember, they did not have plastic bags.

You will have noticed the words “judiciously chosen” in the second sentence of the previous paragraph. I inserted them when preparing the final draft of this text, when it struck me with tremendous force that to say merely “a bag will stop water entering the holes in the sole of your boot and soaking into your sock, making your foot wet” was a laughably inadequate prescription. I did not actually laugh, but I thumped my forehead with the flat of my hand and groaned at my inexactitude.

Selecting the bag to wear on your foot is not onerous. You just have to ensure that it is a bag which will be impervious to water, hence the reference to plastic bags. Think polythene, or even rubber. It is tempting to advise you against using a paper bag, but you already know that a paper bag would be useless for our present purposes. If you do not know that using a paper bag will leave you with a leaking boot and a soaked sock and foot, you are either too young to be reading this or you have an almost inconceivable lack of common sense, like Tim, who put a paper bag on his boot when he dangled his foot into a paddling pool.

It is for Tim, and those like Tim, that this article has been written. When you meet Tim, and see at a glance that he has only one leg, you will understand why throughout I have referred to the boot and the sock and the foot in the singular. If you are a biped, you can still reap the benefits of my thoughtful advice by making the necessary adjustments to the text in your head. I am in no mood to repeat the whole thing again, ever, even if flooding becomes widespread in these dismal fens where we live out our dismal lives under a dismal sky that threatens rain again today.