Artikel aus der südafrikanischen "Sunday Times", 23. Mai:

Foot for thought
Lin Sampson

She swoops into the Waterfront mall, glossy and demented with
chicness,
with notable hair that springs from beneath, of all things, a hat.

However, the other end of her is entirely unadorned. She has
bare feet.
You feel she should be turned upside down, so her hat would
cover her
prehensile toes.

I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of people nowadays
have
ditched their shoes.

Wander through retail pavilions, go to the cinema, visit a
restaurant
and you'll see more and more people without shoes.

You will become an expert on toes. There are toes the colour of
rose
quartz; toes like charred, braaied chops; toes that sprout hair
and toes
that look like boiled sweets. There are toes that arouse sadistic
fantasies; toes you would like to bite.

Barefoot is big. It is no longer cheesy to be without shoes; it is
chic
and according to the Society for Barefoot Living, a lifestyle
choice -
always ominous words.

"We enjoy," babbles the society's website, "feeling the many
textures
the world has to offer." Oh, really?

Personally, there are a few textures I'd prefer not to feel.

There are barefoot bashes, barefoot hikes, a winter
barefoot-fest,
barefoot parties and barefoot weddings. In fact, I once got
married
barefoot because on the day I couldn't find one of my shoes. In
the days
of hippiedom, this was considered cool.

According to the journal of the National Association of
Chiropodists, a
lot of stuff goes on beneath a shoe where the dark and damp
inter-digital spaces provide optimum growing conditions. These
are
places you could grow mushrooms in. There are diseases like
dermatomycotic and other rude names that could stop Manolo
Blahnik in
mid-stride, to coin a phrase.

Apparently rickshaw pullers have the healthiest feet on earth.
Well,
that's after the initial pain and swelling of the foot and ankle.
After
that it's a breeze.

A French friend of mine who has come to live in South Africa
cannot
believe that people will go out without shoes. He points,
incredulously,
to a young man wandering past his shop without shoes, his feet
looking
like undercooked Cornish pasties.

When I was growing up, the vogue was to go to farms to learn
Afrikaans.
All the boys had bare feet. The contact of a bare foot under a
table is
unspeakably sexy - although it frequently belonged to the
dominee.

Do you remember how successful Afrikaners like heart surgeon
Chris
Barnard used to say: "I went to school barefoot because there
wasn't
money for shoes"?

Who could forget Zola Budd, who made barefoot running
fashionable?
Perhaps we should look into bare feet more closely. Are they
perhaps a
step up to success? Are we wasting our time climbing the
corporate
ladder in our Blahniks or Clergeries?

I wondered what the law had to say about bare feet. Apparently
it is not
illegal to go without shoes, neither is it illegal to drive without
shoes. If you don't want to wear shoes, nobody can make you,
not even
the law.

All this is tragic news for shoe fetishists. I know a man who loves
low-slung shoes that show the beginning of the toes. He says
they look
like five little cleavages.

On my way to work an old man accosts me and asks for money.
"Lady," he
whines, "look, I haven't even got shoes."

"Well," I say cold-heartedly, "you couldn't be more in fashion."