A letter from a reader

At 67, I realised I had been choosing shoes by whether I could get them on

I have never written anything like this before, and I want to say at the start that I am not a writer and I am not in the habit of telling other women what to put on their feet.

But four different women asked me about my shoes at a coffee morning a fortnight ago, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

It started in May, on the bottom stair. That is where I had taken to sitting down to put my shoes on, because bending over my own feet standing up had quietly stopped being something I could do. My daughter came round, saw me there working up to it, and said it perfectly kindly.

Mum, do you want me to do those for you?

She meant it as a help. I know she did. But I sat there with one shoe on and thought, so this is how it goes then.

I did not choose that. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides to start planning their morning around a pair of laces.

How it happens

It is not one day. It is a slow narrowing.

First you stop wearing the ones with the stiff backs. Then the ones that need a shoehorn go to the back of the wardrobe. Then you find yourself in a shop holding a pair you actually like and putting them down again, because you have already pictured the fuss of getting into them.

And what is on offer once you get to that point is genuinely dispiriting. Black. Beige. Something in a wide fit the colour of a plaster, described as comfortable, which we all know by now means nobody thought about you very hard.

So you buy the black ones. They are fine. Nobody says anything, which is rather the point.

What I had wrong

Here is the bit I got most wrong, and I think a lot of us have.

I had decided that a shoe with no fastening would not hold my foot. That slip-on meant sloppy, and I would be shuffling about in something that came off at the back on every step.

It turns out that was never slip-ons. That was cheap slip-ons.

The thing that holds your foot in is not the lace. It is whether the collar is knitted to grip round the ankle, whether there is a real shape under the arch instead of a flat board, and whether the sole is deep enough to take the shock out of a pavement before it reaches your knees.

Get those three right and there is nothing to fasten because there is nothing that needs fastening. That took me until 67 to work out.

The shoes are called the Augusta

They are from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now.

They are called the Augusta. A soft knitted slip-on in a proper sage green, with a stretchy collar, a thick cushioned white sole, and not a lace or a buckle anywhere on them. They come in a grey and a black and two purples as well, which I will come back to.

That was the first thing, and honestly it was the whole thing. Standing up. No stair, no shoehorn, no working up to it.

The second thing was the sole. It is deep and soft and there is a proper roll to it, so walking down our road does not send a jolt up through me at every step the way my old ones did.

And the knit breathes, which in the last few weeks has mattered more than I expected.

What happened at the coffee morning

I wore them for the first time to the coffee morning at the church hall, with navy trousers.

Four women asked me where they were from. Four. One of them was Denise, who I have known for twenty years and who has never once commented on anything I have worn.

She said I looked like I had somewhere to be. I have decided to take that as a compliment.

What I noticed more than the compliments, though, was that I stopped thinking about them. I was not aware of my feet at all, which after two years of being quite aware of them was a strange and rather lovely absence.

The next morning I put them straight on to take the dog across the field, and they were just as right for that.

Three things I have learned since

One. There is nothing to fasten. That sounds like a small thing written down. It is not. It is the difference between leaving the house when you decide to and leaving the house when you have finished getting ready to.

Two. The sole does the work. I had not realised how much of my tiredness by four in the afternoon was simply the ground coming back up at me. A deep cushioned sole quietly takes most of that away.

Three. They are a colour. This matters more than I would have admitted a year ago. Green shoes look like a choice. The beige ones I had been buying looked like something I had been issued with.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Augusta is £29.95. It was £60.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because you can pay three times that in a shop in town for something that will still need a shoehorn.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and they run a summer sale to shift the season's stock before it turns.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. Real people, mixed opinions, mostly very good.

Then I ordered the grey ones as well.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat in the garden and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If you have started sitting down to put your shoes on, and you have not mentioned it to anybody, you are not on your own and there is nothing the matter with you. Half the women in that church hall are doing the same thing and none of them have said so either.

But you do not have to accept beige and a shoehorn as the price of it. That is a choice somebody else made about what we would be offered, and you can simply decline it.

Two practical things. The sale is on at the moment, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first, which I found out because the 6 in green was gone by the time I went back for a second pair. And once the summer stock has sold through, that is it until next year.

I have not sat on the bottom stair since May.

Maggie