It’s probably my age by there’s a been a lot of talk going on around me lately concerning bunions. I don’t know much about the bunion, other than that it rhymes with onion and grunion, but I do know that it afflicts women more than men, mostly due to the wearing of high heeled and pointy-toed shoes.
Yet lately I’ve noticed a lot of bunion complaints among men of a certain age. None of these men wear high heels, as far as I know, and none of them are proponents of the winkle picker, so what else could it be?
A study by the College of Podiatry found that most of us in Britain, men and women, wear shoes that are the wrong size. Men are the worst culprits: two-thirds of us wrap our plates of meat in ill-fitting footwear. Which is ironic, given that the foot is a unit of measurement. It ought to lend itself quite naturally to dimensional precision.
But then, whose foot are we talking about? Legend has it that the standard foot was based on the size of King Henry I’s tootsies. That would mean he wore size 13 moccasins, which seems incredible for a man living in the 12th century, when the average height was around 5’8″. He would have looked like a giant L.
But maybe it was his enormous feet that marked him out as king material. Maybe our whole Royal line is predicated on the ability of various ambitious medieval blokes to remain upright in a strong wind. It’s more likely, though, that the standard foot was not based on a foot at all but derived from the standard inch – the width of a thumb – in bunches of 12.
We have a funny relationship with feet, don’t we? They can be both sexy and repulsive, a source of pleasure and a source of pain. I had a couple of shingle beach experiences over the summer, both of which threw me into an emotional conflict between the unbridled joy of swimming in the waves and the Geneva Convention defying torture of walking barefoot over pebbles.
You would think, given their role in life, that your feet would be more robust and impervious to pain. The skin on the soles of your feet is thicker than anywhere else on your body, yet it screams like a lamb the second you dig anything into it. Together, your feet contain over a quarter of all the bones in your body – that’s a lot to break. Ever since David Beckham invented the metatarsal, footballers and other sportspeople have been breaking them left, right and centre (for those with three legs) and the pain on their faces is enough to make a scaffolder blanch.
Our feet also have more nerve endings per square inch than any other part of the body. Really? Yes, really. That’s why they’re so damn ticklish.
Apparently, our feet would be more resilient if we didn’t wrap them up in metaphorical cotton wool. Those tender soles would toughen up smartish if we went everywhere barefoot. The downside, of course, would be that we’d end up with all manner of nails and glass and ring pulls stuck in our feet and we’d scratch up the parquet when we got home.
