Every girl loves shoes, right?

We’re stereotypically obsessed by them. All girls allegedly want to be Imelda Marcoss when we grow up.

Not me.

I’m apparently one of those rare women who want shoes that work and last. Looking pretty is icing on the cake. I’m going to spend all day in these suckers and I do not want pinched toes or sharp decorative bits or heels that make my trick ankles go off - resulting in a foot turned suddenly and painfully to the side.

The sole of one’s foot should be parallel with the ground, not perpendicular. Especially when one is in motion.

You have no idea how hard it is to find a ladies’ shoe that fits the following criteria: hard-wearing, flat-heeled, having a decent tread, long-lasting and comfortable.

I swear there’s someone in the ladies’ shoe industry who’s completely misogynistic and has decreed by law that all ladies’ shoes should hurt women in some way.

I thought I had found an ideal sandal in Colorado. It looked okay, it had a decent tread on the sole. It was not balanced on a tiny little spike of a heel and it had lovely cork padding to comfort my aching feet as I ran around doing things.

It had a plastic sole, but I thought I could deal with that.

I obviously thought wrong.

Fast forward two and a half years, and my weight and compounded abuses have compressed the cork quite a bit. Once summer rolls around, I wear these shoes goddamn everywhere. I run in them. I shop in them. I walk around and do all the ordinary things in them. I have them to the point where they almost put themselves on.

And that’s the point where a hidden design flaw started to injure me.

See, plastic soles don’t naturally mesh with anything. you have to have surface area so whatever you’re gluing them to stays glued. Which usually means the “inside” surface of your plastic sole has a big, rigid + across the heel.

Fine when it’s new.

When the shoe gets old, the distance between the centre of that “plus” and the customer’s heel gets shorter. It starts to directly effect the foot.

In my case, I now have bone bruises on my heels because of something that’s designed to fail.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. The sandal still looks great. You can’t see anything wrong with it. The plastic sole still looks just as good now as the day I bought it with the shoe. However, the nice padding between that plastic sole and my good self has worn down in the center, where my heel strikes.

That center is exactly where the “plus” is.

Guess what’s been impacting my heel every time I take a step?

So every time I walk, I injure myself. It’s at the point where it hurts like walking on nails whenever I have to get up.

Anyone who’s never had a bone bruise may be laughing at me now. But let me tell you, they’re as painful as all shit. And they keep being painful. Trust me, you don’t know what you’ve got until it hurts like a stabbing when you sit and rest, and it hurts like a stabbing when you put your weight on it.

And you have to rest the injured area for months. No chance of that, I’m a mum. Mums don’t get to rest.

So now I have another category in my ever-lengthening list of things to avoid when I’m shopping for shoes.

No fucking plastic soles!

They are evil.

Could someone tell my why shoe shopping is supposed to be fun, please?