Oh, blessed relief. I've just kicked mu boots off and am relishing the cool freedom my toes have found. Lucky am I (more precisely, everybody else)that I am wearing clean socks.
It is one of those historical facts that the British army (well, the forces generally) is never properly prepared to fight a war until somewhere around the second year of conflict. Things go horribly wrong for the first part and they hang on for grim death, retreating a little here, holding up there, until the civilian paymasters wake up and start providing the proper resources to get the job done.
Provided they can escape catastrophic defeat in the early period, they tend to be on the winning side in the end. It's not an inviolable fact, but it's true in more instances than not - especially in the past couple of hundred years.
Two days ago, my favourite pair of boots began to rebel. A nail holding the sole on started digging into my foot. I didn't enjoy it, and limped home at a very sad pace. I dug out a new pair of leather inner soles and stuffed them in the boots and that worked yesterday until about 3 pm when it all went wrong all over again. Today those inner soles and my feet are inhabiting a new pair of boots. New as in unworn - I bought them about a year ago, but haven't used them before today.
The brutes are fighting back; there is some sort of footwear camaraderie going on, and my new boots are pinching, gripping, chafing and rubbing my feet with the sort of malicious glee that can only be applied by inanimate objects. They look like leather but feel like steel (boots, not feet: would that it was otherwise).
In time, of course, the boots will give up and get broken in. I will win the war, even as I am losing the opening skirmishes. My feet are metaphors for the British army. Or vice-versa. Either way, OW!
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