My Favourite Holiday Accessory

I have to admit that I’m one of those delightful people who pack for all eventualities.  I love the idea of packing light, the freedom of just having one small bag slung on your shoulder.  No ridiculous charges on budget flights that rip you off more than if you flew business class.  The liberation of travelling with a pair of clean pants and not much else appeals but it’s not for me.

Experience has taught me that you can rely on nothing at your destination.  It will be cold and raining at that sunshine-seeking destination, freak weather ordered up especially for the only seven days that you’re going to be there.  Besides which, have you seen how much I pack in a ‘handbag’?!

But my favourite, must-pack accessory?  That is other than penknives, emergency medications, blankets and pillows, adaptors and extension leads and a mountain of books, of course!  It’s got to be the most versatile weapon in my how-to-survive-a-holiday toolkit.

The humble flip-flop.

Oh yes.  They rock.  My feet may not be keen on wearing them for extended periods of time (ie more than 5 seconds) and if you plan on attempting to climb hills and mountains or going hiking in them then I will laugh at your stupidity but they definitely rock.

1.  If you’re brave enough to take your proper shoes off during a flight (I firmly believe that it’s better to be in a plane crash whilst wearing one’s boots, it’ll make all the difference), you can wear the flip-flops as light slippers to track up the grimy aisle to the even more suspicious floor (I’m not one of those modern germ-phobes but I do have certain principles about where I put my bare feet, hospitals and supermarket toilets follow on this list, besides I hate getting my socks dirty and then putting them back into my shoes, euw!) of the toilet cum sardine prison.
2. You can also wear them as slippers in your hotel room, especially if it’s one of those motel or B&B-type places with ‘vintage’ carpet.  (Hmm, maybe I am a little bit of a germ-phobe in certain contexts!)
3. In your hotel room or wherever else you’re pitching up for the night, you can use your flip-flops to wedge doors and windows open, or shut.
4. If you’re in a really swanky place (that’s sarcasm in case you missed it), or just a mud-swamped campsite, you can wear your flip-flops in the shower (yeah, OK, I think my germ phobia is about where I put my feet).
5. You can use flip-flops to swat bugs and fellow travellers.
6. Those flip-flops don’t just wedge doors open, you can use them to prop that really wobbly table up so your drinks are safe or you can just get on with writing a semi-legible postcard.
7. Certain types of beaches are also not particularly kind on the feet (yes, it’s all about the feet, well, we are talking about footwear after all).  They can be hot, they can be sharp, and they can be full of all kinds of nasties.  You need flip-flops.
8. In between swatting annoying pests (human or otherwise), you can fan yourself with them when the heat or humidity gets too much (that doesn’t happen much on my kind of holiday).
9. If it floods (which it does do on my kind of holiday), you can wear them quite happily without fear of shrinkage or worrying about how to dry them out.
10. They also work on a similar principle as snow shoes on mud if that’s more your kind of holiday, willingly or otherwise.
11. Apparently some people wear fashionable shoes, so even the flimsy flip-flop can be a welcome relief after a while.
12. And of course, you can always write a cheerful or profound message on them and leave them on the nearest shoe tree.

 What have you used flip-flops for?  And what do you have to take with you when you travel?

These Boots were Made for Walking

I look down at my boots, just a pair of boots, and wonder.  I look at that photo on my blog of my boots, just a pair of boots, and wonder.  Today when I look at them I see more cracks, more scrapes than when that photo was taken and when I’m as tired as this, a lot less shine.  But still I wonder.

Those boots are eight years old.  Bought with carefully saved money, a sign of rebellion and a claiming of independence.  Teenage-style but at twenty instead.  I sneaked into the shop, a little shop which still exists, like I was going to buy contraband, furtive, embarrassed, determined.  Too shy to point out that for some reason the tongue hasn’t been sewn in properly into one of my boots.  My boots.  I still don’t remember which one though, even after all these years.  Might be the right one.  If not, it’ll be the left.

I hugged them tenderly in my arms, perfectly new and glistening, partly astonished at my bravery, won over by the firm leather and the comfortable fit.  No more fashion shoes for me, well for a little while longer maybe.  But a few years ago skin allergies finally put paid to those flimsy, poorly made types which only lasted a season at best.  My allergies have class, I can only wear DMs.  I wasn’t trying to buy into some stereotype, some role, some identity, some niche but the boots were me.  My boots.

My mother, naturally, was horrified when I got back to the car with my trophies.  It was probably the worse crime I had ever committed.  Even at twenty I didn’t go about without my parents.  I think that I’d shocked myself at spending so much on ‘just a pair of shoes’.  My mother thought it was daylight robbery.  But it was love, pure love and no passing faddish infatuation and I wore them proudly.

I wore them to my driving lessons.  Told the instructor that as these would be the shoes that I’d be driving in for the rest of my life that I might as well start wearing them now.  And no, I didn’t own a pair of trainers.  I passed my driving test in those boots.

Just a few months later.

Independence.  Wings to fly with, boots to walk away in.

Now I look down at my boots and wonder.

I wonder curious things like how many pairs of laces have I gone through on this single pair of boots?  The current laces are brittle and almost glazed-like.  One pair of black laces after another, I can’t even remember when I bought these ones.  It’s hard to find bootlaces these days and everyone says you have to buy 120s for this number of eyes but I’ve worn these boots too long now, I know best.  140s every time.  Bootlaces that are harder to find and get thinner each year.  Bootlaces don’t last forever.  Boots seem to.

I remember the time when I couldn’t lace my boots, when I got tendonitis so badly walking a billion miles across Paris.  A billion miles in freezing fog and on beautiful baguettes washed down with cup-a-soup (for which my husband is still holding me personally responsible for and unforgiven!).  The student is in me still.  I was a ‘student’, albeit briefly, the summer after I bought my boots.  For months after our trip to Paris, I had to leave the laces undone, splayed open, like the tramp of garden ornaments.

I look down at my boots and I wonder.  I wonder many things.

I wonder how many times they’ve been splashed through puddles, marched through streams and accidentally ended up in the sea.  They’ve been full of sand before now, from beaches and deserts and building works.  They’ve seen an awful lot of mud.  I know, I’m the one cleaning it away.  I proudly keep them polished to a service grade shine.  OK, when I’ve got a little more oomph in my polishing at least.  Other times I just try to keep them clean.  Ish.  Babywipe anyone?

I wonder how many countries they have visited.  If boots had their own passport, stamped at every port of entry, what tales it would tell!  My boots have gone everywhere, faithful companions on my travels.  In the snapshots of my mind, I see them tossed down in hotel rooms and standing to attention by tent doorways and drying in front of boilers and radiators.  (Actually even on a hospital ward floor too).  Phobic dread means that they’re always safely on my feet during flights, all those castaway and crashes on desert islands films and series prove the value of having boots on your feet during a crash.  But that isn’t the only reason that those boots are always on my feet.  My boots make me feel taller.  My boots make me feel more confident.

I wonder how many miles my boots have tread.  Do I count the miles that they have been on my feet in a car or in an aeroplane?  What about boats or trains?  Yep, my boots are well-travelled.  Since not having our van anymore, how many miles have they loyally accompanied me on?  How many hills have they tramped me up?  On how many sheets of ice have they held me a little steadier than I would have been otherwise?  How many times have they been caught in the rain with me?

My boots have been to weddings, to funerals.  They have been with me during some of the best times and some of the worst times.  My only regret is that I never wore them to our wedding.  My mother won over, insisted on some satiny ballet pump, shiny soled as a roller skate.  I didn’t have enough confidence back then.  I do today.  Today I ignore the horrified and mortified exclamations that accompany my decision to wear those boots to yet another event.  Some things never change.  I roll my eyes as she’s rolling hers.

When I turn them over today and look then I see that the soles are wearing thin.  There’s been a lot of mileage done in these boots, hundreds of thousands of miles.  These boots are my boots.  They are part of the story, even the very fabric, of my life.  My boots are like that loyal friend who can you pick up at a moment’s notice, we fit together so comfortably and we know that we’re ready for whatever path life throws at us next.  We just keep on walking.  Sometimes it’ll be baby steps, other times we’ll strike out confidently.  But my boots are made for life’s adventures.  Yes indeed, these boots were made for walking.

WOE: Vernacular

She offers to help pack the shopping into the flimsy plastic bags, which I promise you all will be immediately reused as rubbish bags on site, and I reflect on how the world has changed.  Long ago, or maybe it wasn’t so long ago, women shopped with baskets on their arms and headscarves on their heads at small shops where the shopkeeper would have promptly identified me as a furriner.  I wouldn’t have had to say a word, I just wasn’t one of their regulars that was all.  Now I’m shopping in the same supermarket as I can anywhere else and there isn’t much call for conversation, no small talk, just business.

I’ve always prided myself on learning a smattering of the local language on my travels, backing myself up on occasions with a lingua franca.  I’ve spoken Spanish to a Bulgarian lorry driver.  I’ve negotiated for the carpark machine change in Greek and more importantly, found out which was the better brand of Ouzo.  I’ve learned greetings in Arabic.  I can read, but never pronounce, road signs in Welsh.  I’m a dab hand at manipulating phrase book stock phrases into something more useful.  I love words, whatever their language, and the privilege of being to able to communicate.

We finish packing, only a small shop after all, topping up on the fresh stuff that we can’t store for long regardless of the weather and she smiles, I smile.  I fish out the ubiquitous plastic rectangle from my purse, another change in this modern world of shopping.

I sum up my best expression, carefully practised in my mind, and as I hand over the card, say:

“Fenk’yer.”

~

This is in response to the RemembeRED challenge to write a creative non fiction 400 word piece on Dialect and Colloquialisms, I came in with 280 words this week, always under or over!

I love the joys of dialect, the little quirky expressions and how the slightest change of a vowel can place you on the other side of the world so this challenge was right up my street, well good even.  I also want to dedicate it to my strange-talking Norfolk-boy husband who despite leaving the county of his birth when he was a child still can be relied on to say ‘bootful’ and ‘toosday’ as well as other curiosities.

~

If you want to find out a little more about the language that they speak in this corner of England then check out these two links, some things are as alien to me as their landscape but in other pronunciations there is a similarity with the West Country tongue that I am far more familiar with, although less common and less retained than the dialect of the East.

The first is quite an erudite article from Wikipedia and the other the Friends of Norfolk Dialect’s own website.  Have fun!

Get Your Kicks

It was a catchy song, always had been, but they’d never heard it before.  The kind of song you can tap your feet to.  Or click your fingers.  Or whistle or hum.  Or sing again and again.  They played it one more time before drawing out a map unearthed from a forgotten corner of the bookshelf, unfolding its creases carefully.

It winds from Chicago to LA.  More than two thousand miles all the way.

The crossing of a continent by a now barely existent ribbon, nonexistent on this map at least.  Their fingers touched the paper, tentatively.  Then they bowed their heads over, focusing on the small places names dotted here and there, humming and part singing lines of the song, trying to recall all the place names mentioned.  Slowly their fingers traced a journey over the worn paper.

Get your kicks …

A nostalgic technicolour vision of history loomed, like mental postcards with neon lights.  Diners, architecture, cars, desert, railroads …  It was enticing, like the silk laden and spice scented promise of an Eastern bazaar to some travellers, but now they had a different dream, a different pilgrimage calling to them.

They ran the lyrics through one more time, more confidently tracing the rough path across the flat, limited scope of the map.  The places were becoming familiar.

Saint Louis.  Joplin.  Oklahoma City.  Amarillo.  Flagstaff.  Winona, don’t forget Winona.  Kingman.  Barstow.  San Bernardino.

A little more dreaming, a little more research, a little more planning.

It was time to get their kicks on Route 66.

This week’s Red Writing Hood Prompt was ‘Soundtrack of Our Words’, ‘to find the song that will be played during the pivotal scene in the movie based on your magnum opus. With that song playing, write that pivotal scene – it’s your choice whether you write it as a screen play or as it’s played out in your novel.’

Now I don’t dream of ‘making it big’ so I’ve just created a scene with a soundtrack, or perhaps actually a scene based around a soundtrack.  Oh and I’ve listened to it an awful lot more times than the suggested three or four, more than the ‘just enough listening to allow the song to become a stronger part of us without driving us crazier than we already are’.  Crazy but closer to the word count than I usually am!