A letter from a reader

At 67, I had quietly become the woman who says she will wait here

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

It started properly in June, on a coach trip, at the bottom of a perfectly ordinary hill. Everybody else set off up it. I looked at it, and I looked at my feet, and I heard myself say I would stay with the bags. Jean turned round and said the kindest possible thing.

We will only be twenty minutes, Maggie.

She meant it nicely. She always does. But I sat on that bench for twenty minutes with everybody's coats on my lap and thought about how many times I had done exactly that.

I did not choose that. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides to become the one who waits.

How it happens

It happens one small opting-out at a time, and each one is perfectly reasonable on its own.

You skip the walk round the lake because you have been on your feet all morning. You say you will meet them at the cafe. You take the lift while they take the stairs, and you make a joke of it so nobody makes a fuss.

And then one day you notice that you have not actually been on a proper walk with your friends since the spring, and that they have stopped assuming you are coming.

What did not help was what is sold to us. Summer sandals come in two sorts. Flat flimsy things with a bit of string across the toes and nothing at all underneath, or something orthopaedic in a beige so medical it might as well come with a prescription. There is very little in the middle.

What I had wrong

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

I had assumed my feet were simply finished. That this was age, that it was going to keep getting worse, and that the answer was to plan around it.

It was not that. It was that I had been walking about all summer on flat pieces of rubber with nothing under the middle of my foot.

A sandal that holds you up does three things. It has a shaped footbed, so the arch of your foot is supported rather than simply hanging there. It has enough depth in the sole to absorb a pavement. And it adjusts, properly adjusts, because feet in July are not the size they were at breakfast and pretending otherwise is why the straps cut in by the afternoon.

Get those three right and the hill is just a hill. That took me until 67 to work out.

The sandals are called the Beatrix

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 Beatrix. Open toe, a wide strap over the top of the foot, another round the ankle, and a contoured footbed with a real shape moulded into it. Mine are a soft beige. They do a black and a navy and a red as well, which I will come back to.

The first thing you feel is the middle of your foot being met by something. If you have only ever worn flat sandals you will not know what I mean until you do it, and then you will.

The second thing is the straps. They undo and do up again to wherever you need them, which sounds obvious and is the reason I can wear these at six in the evening as happily as at ten in the morning.

And they are cushioned underneath, so an afternoon on paving stones does not finish me off the way it used to.

What happened in Chester

I wore them for the first time on a day out in Chester, and I did the whole thing. The walls, the shops, the long way back to the car park.

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

What she actually said was that I had not once suggested sitting this one out. I have decided to take that as a compliment.

What I noticed more than the compliments, though, was the walk back. Normally that is the bit where I go quiet and count the distance. I was still talking.

The next morning I put them straight back on to go down to the shops, which after a full day out is not something I would have done in June.

Three things I have learned since

One. The straps are the point. Not a detail, the point. Feet swell in the heat, and a sandal that cannot be let out by half an inch at four in the afternoon is a sandal you will take off at five.

Two. There has to be something under the arch. A flat sandal asks the muscles in your foot to do all the holding up, for hours, on concrete. Of course they ache. They are not failing. They are just unsupported.

Three. It gave me back the walk, not the shoes. That is the honest bit. Nothing about my life changed except that I stopped being the one on the bench, and it turns out that was rather a lot.

About the price

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

The Beatrix is £29.95. It was £60.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because supportive sandals in a proper shop start at three times that and go up steeply from there.

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 navy 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 saying you will wait here, and you have started saying it before anybody has even asked, then please do not put that down to your age and leave it there. Mine was my sandals. Yours might be too, and it is a cheap thing to rule out.

Not because a pair of sandals will change your life. They will not. But there is a difference between choosing to sit down and feeling you have to, and I would rather you were choosing.

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 navy 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 minded the bags since June.

Maggie