A letter from a reader

At 67, I had turned down my sister’s Christmas shopping day three years running, because the only place my feet were ever warm was in my slippers

The only thing I write in ink all year is the Christmas card list, and June still rings every December to tell me I have left somebody off it. I am not a writer, and it has never been my place to tell another woman what she ought to put on her feet.

But three different women asked me about my boots on the city walls in Chester on Saturday, and I have now explained it so many times that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

Every year, on the first wet Saturday of the autumn, my sister June goes into Chester to make a start on her Christmas shopping. She walks the walls first, all the way round, because she says it is the only way to see the place properly, and then she does the shops and then we have a pot of tea in the same little tea room we have been going to for thirty years. For most of my life I went with her.

Then, three autumns ago, I stopped. My feet had started to feel the cold in a way they never used to, and the only things that kept them warm were my slippers. My outdoor shoes were cold leather, stiff first thing and slippery on anything wet. So when June rang I would say, you go, love, I will have the soup on for when you get back.

Maggie, you have not been further than the bins in those slippers since September.

That was June, on my doorstep, in the third year of me saying no. She was right, and I knew she was right. I had not decided to become a woman who stays in when it rains. I had just stopped wanting to take my slippers off.

Nobody decides to give up on a day out. It happens one cold pair of shoes at a time, until your sister is stood on your doorstep with her coat on and you are the one saying not this year.

How it happens

When I was younger I never gave my feet a second thought in winter. I put my boots on, I went out, I came home.

What changed was not that I got lazy. It was what there was to put on.

Go and look at winter shoes for women our age. On one side, the smart ones, cold and stiff and slippy on a wet pavement, that you spend the whole day thinking about. On the other side, the warm ones, which as far as I could ever tell were slippers with a better name, and not something you would wear round a city.

So you do what I did. You stay where your feet are warm. Nobody says anything, because nobody notices the days you did not go.

What I had wrong

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

I thought that being warm and comfortable meant staying in. I thought a slipper feeling was something you could only have by the fire, and that going out meant giving it up for the day.

It turns out that was never true.

It was that nobody had ever put a slipper’s warmth and softness into something with a sole I could trust on a wet step. I had been choosing between warm feet and a day out for so long that I had forgotten there could be both.

A plush lining, a soft cushioned inside, a sole that grips on wet stone, and a boot that looks perfectly nice in a tea room. It took me three winters of soup to work that out.

Then June turned up in a pair

The day after the doorstep, June came back. She stood in my kitchen in a pair of black ankle boots with a little rim of white plush round the top, took one off, handed it to me and told me to put my hand inside it.

It was like putting my hand into a slipper that had been warming by the fire. She said they were from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now, and that they had a sale on.

They are called the Melissa. A low, soft ankle boot that just covers the ankle, mine in a warm tan brown, with a soft brushed finish, a little rim of white plush that shows all the way round the top, and a stitched seam that runs round from the toe along each side. There is nothing to lace and nothing to zip. You slide your foot in and that is that. I ordered mine that evening.

The lining is plush all the way through, so my feet are warm from the moment I step out of the front door, not twenty minutes later. They have soft cushioning inside, and they are comfortable from first thing in the morning until I take them off at night. And the sole is non-slip, with a proper grip on wet and slippery ground, which is the bit I had stopped believing anything warm could manage.

That is really all there is to them. They are not complicated. They are just boots that somebody thought about.

What happened on the walls

On Saturday I went with June for the first time in three years. It had rained all morning and was still spitting. The walls in Chester are old red sandstone, worn into shallow dips by more feet than anybody could count, and when they are wet they are the colour of strong tea and just as shiny.

We did the whole circuit. Three women asked me about my boots before we had even got round to the tea room. The first was a lady waiting at the top of the steep old steps up by the clock, who watched me come up them and asked where they were from before I had got my breath. The second was a young woman behind us in the queue for tea.

The third was Moira, who I was at school with, and who we bump into on the walls most years. In sixty years Moira has never said one word about anything I have had on. She looked straight down at my feet and said, Since when have you had nice feet, Maggie? I am choosing to take that as a compliment.

What I noticed more than the asking, though, was that I forgot about my feet. For three winters my feet had been the first thing I thought about every time the weather turned. On Saturday I spent the whole day looking at the river and the cathedral and the shop windows, which is the entire point of going, and my feet were warm the whole way round.

The next morning I wore them to take the labrador down the lane, through the wet leaves and back, and then I simply did not take them off. They went from the lane to the kitchen to the armchair. June says that is the most Maggie thing she has ever heard.

Three things I have learned since

One. Nothing to fasten. No laces, no zips, no bending down to fiddle with anything. You slide them on standing up in the hall, which on a cold morning with a labrador at the door is worth more than I can tell you.

Two. They go with what you already have. The colour is soft and neutral, and they look right with jeans, with leggings and with ordinary trousers. I wear mine with slim navy trousers that stop just above the plush, so it shows.

Three. Order your usual size. They come from a UK 2 up to a UK 8.5. I am a 6 and the 6 was right.

About the price

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

The Melissa is £29.95. It was £60.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid more than that for a pair of slippers that never once left the house.

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 have a sale on at the moment while the winter stock comes in.

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. One woman from Llangollen had written, “Wore the grey ones on the canal towpath in the rain and came home with warm, dry feet and not one wobble.”

Then I ordered the grey pair as well, for the days when the brown ones are drying by the back door.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat in that tea room by the window, with our shopping bags round our ankles and the rain on the glass, this is what I would say.

If you have started saying no to days out because the only place your feet are ever warm is in your slippers, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a pair of boots will change your life. They will not. But there is something in saying yes when your sister rings, and walking the walls in the rain with warm feet, and I would rather you did not give that up the way I nearly did.

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 grey had gone by the time I went back and I had to wait for it. And the first of the winter stock is already going, so I would not leave it until the frosts.

June has booked the tea room for the same Saturday next year. She did not ask me if I was coming. She just put me down for two.

Maggie