AND DID THOSE FEET

The state of my feet!  One foot bandaged to support a sprain; the other sporting a newly plastered toe where the first sandals of summer have scuffed the thinnest skin.  Most of my toes now seem bent at arthritic angles.   If you could see underneath my feet, you’d find a variety of verrucas and blisters.  Hardened yellow nails defy normal cutting, so often curl downwards or inwards.  I am on my way to sitting in a chair all day with my slippers on.  

But is it any wonder that aged feet are in such poor shape? By the time we’re over 70, they have done an enormous amount of standing, walking, running, dancing, kicking, jumping and general weight-bearing.  I don’t know how accurate this is, but according to something called SnowBrains.com, “the average moderately active person takes around 7,500 step/day.  If you maintain that daily average and live until 80 years of age, you’ll have walked about 216,262,500 steps in your lifetime. The average person with the average stride living until 80 will walk a distance of around 110,000 miles.  Which is the equivalent of walking about 5 times around the Earth, right on the equator!”

Actually, it feels like more.  Just looking at my feet provokes some self-pity - how come these two plates of meat with their 26 tiny bones, 33 joints, muscles, tendons and ligaments have endured my hefty weight for this long?  Other mammals spread their load over four feet.  If you’ve ever tried to carry a human adult, you’ll know the burden we put on these relatively small appendages every day. In ageing, I have grown a shoe size as my feet have flattened out with use.

Podiatry and chiropody for sprained and broken ankles seem to work: good results from both.  Body massages usually end with smoothing the feet and gently tugging the toes - nice.  I’d do a pedicure more often if it didn’t cost an arm and a leg. I have tried reflexology - interesting, but not interesting enough to have a second go.  

I don’t understand foot fetishists, but then I don’t know any women who feel that way about feet: perhaps it’s a male thing.  I also don’t understand the female obsession with buying shoes.   I do get toe-sucking though - a surprisingly erotic experience.

It isn’t that I find feet ugly and smelly, as some people do.  Like my hands, my feet are more functional than anything else, appendages that hang off the end of my body and do a very good job.  In other cultures, there is much more attention paid to how feet look - elaborate henna patterns before a Hindu wedding, for example, and ankle bracelets.  I do think some painted toenails look nice, and I occasionally do mine, though right now I wouldn’t want to draw attention to my feet. 

In many religious households, people take their shoes off before entering their own or someone else’s house: the home for Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and Hindus is as much a sacred space as a temple, where shoes are always taken off.  In Judaism shoes are kept on in the synagogue and it’s more optional at home, but Jews in mourning are expected to remove their shoes. In Christianity there is a tradition of the priest washing the congregants’ feet on Maundy Thursday (before Easter) as an act of humility, remembering Jesus washing his disciples’ feet the night before he was taken off to be crucified.   

I do like the idea of mutual washing of feet, something caring and levelling about it….  I’ve done this with women friends in the past.  I also like the feeling of a floor that is polished wood or cool marble under bare feet.   In the UK, removing shoes in someone’s else’s house seems to have become a normal gesture of hygiene and respect, whatever the floor’s like.  

The other association I have with feet is constant walking.   Walking because it’s my favourite form of transport, and walking to map out my territory.  All my life I have scouted new places on foot, whether around a place of work or a new place to live: literally, pacing my territory.  I don’t know if others do this.  I only think I really know a place when I’ve walked its parameters, felt the pavement under my feet. 

Therapeutically speaking, there’s an emphasis on placing feet square on the ground, establishing a connection to the earth in order to restore balance and stature. If you’ve ever done a walking meditation, dance or yoga, you will know that interacting with the ground beneath your feet will make the difference between fluidity and falling over.  When you think about all those expressions we use - putting your best foot forward, getting your foot in the door, dipping a toe in the water, walking a mile in their shoes, footprints in the sand - it is as though we have an instinctive appreciation that our feet express something essential about the way we live in the world.

Knowing several people who are diabetic or pre-diabetic in old age, I’d like to say that I’m going to take more care of my feet. I don’t want ulcers or gangrene.   So I will cut my toenails for as long as I can bend down, keep them washed so that they don’t develop fungal infections, wear shoes that aren’t a torture.  But I confess, my feet only seem to grab my attention when there’s something wrong with them.  If I think about a newborn baby’s foot, its delicacy and perfection, I can hardly think of a greater contrast with my old foot, and yet they both express the essence of fragility, resilience and - dare I say it - even beauty.