A letter from a reader

At 67, I owned a pair of smart shoes I could only wear sitting down

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 wedding a fortnight ago, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

It started at a different wedding, last summer, my niece's. I had bought smart shoes for it and by the time the speeches began I had them off under the table, in stockinged feet on a marquee floor, hoping nobody would need me to stand up. My sister leaned over and said it without any malice at all.

You have got your shoes off again.

Again. That was the word that stayed with me.

I did not choose that. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody buys shoes intending to spend the occasion sitting down in them.

How it happens

There is an unwritten rule that smart has to hurt, and we all seem to have agreed to it.

A wedding comes up, or a christening, or a funeral, and you go and buy something that goes with the outfit. You know while you are paying for it that you will not last the day in it. You buy it anyway, because the alternative on the shelf is something flat and clumpy that will make the whole outfit look like an apology.

So you develop tactics. You sit down early and often. You do the photographs and then you disappear. You keep a pair of flats in the car.

And year after year the smart shoes stay in the wardrobe looking immaculate, because immaculate is what shoes look like when they have never really been walked in.

What I had wrong

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

I thought the choice was between smart and comfortable, and that at my age I simply had to pick one and be gracious about it.

It turns out the thing that made those shoes unbearable was not that they were smart. It was that they were rigid.

A hard shoe has one shape and your foot has to agree to it for six hours. A shoe knitted from something with a bit of give does the opposite. It widens where your foot is widest, it does not have a seam sitting across the joint of your toe, and there is nothing to dig in because there is nothing rigid to dig.

Smart was never the problem. Stiff was. That took me until 67 to work out.

The shoes are called the Evelina

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 Evelina. A soft knitted flat in a pale oatmeal with a faint sheen to it, cut low at the sides with a neat square toe, and you simply step into them. They do them in black and khaki and a white as well, which I will come back to.

Because that was the doubt, if I am honest. I expected them to look like slippers with a dress. They do not. The low sides and the square toe make them read as a proper shoe, and the pale oatmeal does a lot of the work.

The knit is the rest of it. It gives across the widest part of the foot instead of gripping it, and there is no stiff edge anywhere to press into you.

And they are flat, which means I was not standing in the church car park working out how far it was to the door.

What happened at the wedding

I wore them to the wedding with a navy dress, and I stood through the entire photographs. All of them. The family ones, the friends ones, the endless rearranging.

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

What she actually said was that she could not believe I was still standing. I have decided to take that as a compliment.

What I noticed more than the compliments, though, was that I did not take them off. Not under the table, not during the speeches, not in the car going home. It did not come up.

The next morning I wore them into town, which is not something that has ever once happened to a pair of my wedding shoes.

Three things I have learned since

One. Give beats width. I had spent years looking for a wide fit. What I actually needed was a shoe that would widen itself where my foot needed it and stay neat everywhere else.

Two. Flat does not have to mean clumpy. What makes a flat shoe look heavy is a thick sole and a round blunt front. A low-cut side and a squarer toe read as smart from the moment you put them on.

Three. You stop rationing yourself. This is the real one. When your shoes will last the day you stop planning the day around them, and you would be surprised how much of an occasion you get back.

About the price

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

The Evelina is £24.95. It was £50.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because the shoes sitting unworn in my wardrobe cost the better part of four times that.

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 black as well, for the winter.

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.

Go and look at the smart shoes in your wardrobe. If they still look new, that is not because you have looked after them. It is because you have never been able to wear them, and you have been quietly working around that for years without ever calling it a problem.

You are allowed to simply stop. There is no rule that says the shoes have to hurt.

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 black was gone by the time I went back for it. And once the summer stock has sold through, that is it until next year.

I have not taken my shoes off under a table since.

Maggie